


Equations for a Falling Body

by csoru



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: M/M, Non-Consensual Branding, Non-Consensual Drug Use, bad decisions all around, dubcon and aftermath of dubcon, mindmeld gone wrong, sort-of aliens made them do it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-26
Updated: 2016-10-10
Packaged: 2018-08-17 11:52:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 25,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8142797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/csoru/pseuds/csoru
Summary: “So, good news,” says Lance, voice a little strangled. “I seriously doubt that’s a killer neurotoxin. Or knockout gas.”
(Keith, Lance, an alien drug and an enclosed space, and what happens after.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Acknowledgements: Febricant helped deliver this fic, like the world’s best monstrous midwife. Raimi sustained my girlish enthusiasm. The Twitter gang enabled. Many, many thanks.
> 
> I’m certain that everything in this story has been done before and will be done again, though maybe with less prominent horror overtones. (In space, no one can hear you scream.) Regardless, if you’re looking for awkward sex, emotional repression, body autonomy issues out the ass and a general vibe of feelbad morbidity, hi.

Something sharp and angular is digging into the curve of Keith’s hip bone. The edge of his flight suit. It’s the discomfort that wakes him, but not what keeps him awake: he’s used to ignoring discomforts, but could never sleep through noises and talk, kids young and older at the group home coming and going, then cadets and instructors and officers, a monotony of white noise that he felt like an ache in the roots of his teeth. Nails on a chalkboard. Here, too. The ship is full of voices.

It creaks and groans as it slogs through the uncharted vacuum of space, ungiving void pushing against alloys that Keith couldn’t even begin to guess the names of. Not steel, not aluminium, not anything commonly used on Earth; no vessel built on Earth could ever withstand the pressure of thirty, fifty, a hundred g without pulverising every atom of any living tissue within it. Prolonged orbital travel decreases bone density in human subjects. They gave them supplements for that, at the Garrison. No one was giving them supplements aboard the Altean castle ship.

Keith supposes no one is going to give them supplements here, either.

It’s dark in the brig. He can see the tips of his fingers if he extends his arms, but not much else.

He gets up; it takes him a moment to find his balance, and he doesn’t remember his legs being this sore. He’s sore all over, as if coming off a long fever.

He doesn’t remember being brought here, but his ribs ache and there’s a throb localised somewhere above the top vertebra of his spine, so the process can’t have been pretty, or gentle. All he remembers is the Galra sonar navigation closing in on Red, like a shark smelling blood in the water, and then everything happening in oversaturated, adrenaline-fuelled snapshots: the scream of alarms as the ion propellent fuses were overloaded, then blown one by one; the choking push of his flight suit as the speed and pressure kept him pinned to the pilot seat; the engines finally giving. If it were happening in an atmosphere, he’d drop out of the sky. In vacuum, Red was hurled forwards. It would never lose momentum if the Galra ship hadn’t overridden its flight protocols and wrenched some last shreds of control from its collapsing bowels.

The last thing Keith remembers is the red lion’s lights blinking out despite his begging it to hold on. He must have passed out when the pilot cabin was depressurised.

His clothes under the flight suit are soaked through with sweat. Keith grits his teeth so they won’t start chattering, but all it accomplishes is an ache in his jaw. He hums, instead.

He might not remember being brought into the brig, but logic dictates that there is a way in, and doors go both ways. He starts to look for his way out. He takes off his gloves.

The walls are smooth, cold like concrete, and carry a dampness that is more a suggestion of itself. Like the room could be flooded, but hasn’t been in a while, and only the sense memory remains. He feels something like a seam, traces it upwards until it splinters. Panels.

It occurs to him to think it strange that there is survivable atmosphere in the brig. Cell, maybe. It shouldn’t make sense for the Galra to breathe the same kind of air people do.

Five steps to the left, after he traces the width of three cold, could-be-has-been damp panels, he trips over something.

It groans.

“Can you please go back to singing in your girly dulcet tones? I liked that more than you kicking me in the face. That’s the money maker, I’ll have you know.”

“What the hell — Lance?”

Lance makes a noise that falls somewhere between a laugh and _mnrgh_ , like a dog coming short of breath in the middle of a bark. Keith drops to his knees on the floor, and the darkness in front of him arranges itself into a thicker shade of black before his eyes adjust enough that he can make out a lanky shape curled on its side. For a second, the ache in Keith’s spine surges. His vision blacks out completely.

“Oh, no, no, no, come on. Wake up. You’re not leaving me here all alone with your corpse stinking up the place.”

Hands pawing uselessly at his face. Keith bats them away. “Stop touching me.”

“Behold, he speaks.” Lance prods him one more time, and Keith entertains a brief but satisfying fantasy of snapping both his wrists the way they were taught in training, in an unlikely event that a combat situation might require hand-to-hand. He shakes his head, and the pain going supernova behind his eyeballs recedes, if only slightly. He’s no longer kneeling. The wall is cold at his back. Lance must have moved him. Keith can’t remember losing consciousness.

“What are the signs of a concussion, again?”

Silence, then: in the dim blankness of the brig, Lance moves close enough that Keith can make out his face despite the darkness, his wide eyes and the worried twist of his mouth, a splotch of dark at his left temple that has to be a bruise. He didn’t go without a fight, either.

“A headache,” he says, and immediately seems to realise how idiotic he sounds. “Dizziness, nausea, and, uh…memory? Issues? Hold on.” Touch, again. Keith jerks away; Lance’s gloves are cold and rough. “Don’t bite me, I’m gonna check if you have brain damage.”

“You can’t possibly know how to check for that.”

Lance pries his eyelids open, and it’s only then that Keith realises he has shut his eyes between one beat of his heart and the next. The brig seems brighter, this time. He can almost register the white of Lance’s flight suit as a lesser shade of black standing out in the otherwise impenetrable darkness.

“I know if there’s brain damage, your pupils will be uneven. Or something.” He turns Keith’s head this way and that, like he’s examining a rare species of animal he’s about to cut open. “Too bad I can’t see your pupils. Any idea where we are?”

Keith shrugs. Far above them, something moans: metallic, inorganic. The ship speaking to itself. “Galra starship. They got Red.”

“‘Got’ as in…?”

Got as in dead. Keith doesn’t want to say it; doesn’t want to give the thought a foothold in reality, where his failure will have a meaning and consequences. He twists out of Lance’s grip and forces himself to his feet. He says, “Pretty much. Blue?”

“A little beat up, but it should fly all right if I can get to it.”

Silence again. When Keith makes an effort and actually listens — disregards the noises of the ship, the push and pull of its inner workings like sparks travelling through the nervous system of some inexplicably complicated mechanised organism; his own heartbeat, blood pounding in his ears — disregarding it all, he can hear the soft sound of Lance breathing. Keith doesn’t let it be comforting.

…

After an hour of tripping and staggering around the cell, blindly groping at the walls, Keith loudly insults Lance’s piloting skills to hear him squawk in outraged dignity. He picks the corner of the room furthest from the source of the noise.

Keith knows it’s been an hour. He’s counting. He doesn’t lose any more time; doesn’t slip back into awareness in a position he wasn’t in before, doesn’t blink himself awake in a heretofore unknown set of circumstances. His hour is as good as a real one.

They found no door, only smooth, chilly panels lining all four walls of the room. No ceiling where they could reach, and nothing to differentiate the floor from the walls. All the sounds Keith can hear seem to come from outside and up, a low but unceasing hum of generators and machines keeping the ship afloat in the perpetual nothingness of the void. Its vastness makes Keith slightly ill, even beyond the low-level nausea from the throbbing ache at the top of his spine, and he can only hope they haven’t jumped into an unknown quadrant of Galra space, never to see familiar stars again.

The solitude of the sky, made exponentially larger in orbit, never affected him. It’s not the thought of being alone, but rather of being only with Lance in hostile territory that makes him nervous, now.

How far are they from the others? How many light years? How many galaxies, separated by endless swathes of dead space?

As soon as he’s sat in a corner of the cell opposite from Lance, Keith starts stripping out of his flight suit, trying to get away from his own cold sweat and the feeling of flexible alien alloys sticking to every inch of exposed skin. It takes a while, when reaching behind himself to disengage the seals is enough to make his eyes water. His right shoulder doesn’t seem dislocated, but the joint is sore, aching when he twists the wrong way.

He must make some kind of noise. Across the cell, Lance says, “If you want to hurl, aim at yourself and away from me.”

Keith pauses. His fingers itch. He can’t see Lance, but he doesn’t have to: he knows that blandly shit-eating expression by heart, and Lance’s tone is one that always accompanies it. “Are you gonna help me get us out of here,” he says, enunciating through the clench of his jaw, “or are you just gonna provide running commentary?”

“Who says I can’t do both?”

Keith shuts his eyes and knocks his head, gently, against the wall. The back of his neck hurts. He tries to ignore it.

…

After three hours, he imagines that the ship is empty: that some manner of apocalyptic event occurred when Red went down, and it’s taken all the Galra onboard with it, overheated engines and hyperdrive succumbing to entropy with a sweeping vengeance. Imagines stepping, finally, out of the brig to find the ship silent as a grave. Dead machines, all their circuitry limp and tangled. No signs of life. Darkness lurking out of sight, and within it something else, waiting.

He comes to with a small gasp as the floor rushes in to meet him, and he catches himself on one hand, the slap of skin loud against the floor.

“Are you okay?” Lance’s voice comes from a different direction than Keith heard it last, and he should have registered Lance moving. He could never sleep through that kind of noise. He picks himself back up, pulls his knees to his chest and rests his forehead against them.

“Probably kind of definitely a concussion,” he says.

“If you die, I’m totally using your body for sustenance. Like an Arctic explorer. In space.” Lance huffs out a laugh, breathless around the edges, as though he can’t be bothered to fake humour.

“Are _you_ okay?” Keith asks, and immediately itches at the feeling of an unwillingly exposed nerve. He waits for Lance to laugh, and knows something is wrong when he doesn’t.

Instead there is a pause, long enough for Keith to start wondering if he’d spoken at all, reality close to slipping in the featureless dark of the brig. Finally, Lance clears his throat. There is a shuffling noise as he moves, and his voice is light when he says, “Look, don’t freak out or anything, but, uh, I think I’m bleeding.”

“What?” Keith scrambles to his feet, almost trips in the dark. He steadies himself with one hand on the wall and keeps it there, follows the marked path from one corner of the cell to the next. He finds Lance closer than he expected, long limbs thrown haphazardly every which way; he’s sat with his back to a wall and as Keith moves to kneel down next to him, he sees that Lance has one hand clamped over the back of his neck. It’s bare. He took off the gloves of his flight suit.

“We’ve been here for hours,” Keith rants, simmering irritation almost enough to drown out his worry. He doesn’t want to worry. He just doesn’t want to be here alone. “Why the hell are you only telling me now that you’re injured?”

Lance sighs, worldweary and put-upon. “Man. It figures your whining is gonna be the last thing I hear before I die.”

But he takes his hand away from his neck and shows Keith his palm. Even through the darkness, even though what’s visible of both his skin and flight suit is grey and flat, Keith can see the bloody stain. It’s black, like a hole going unevenly through the meat of Lance’s palm. Ignoring Lance’s surprised _hey!_ , Keith grabs him by the hair and pulls his head down. He wishes there was any kind of light, anything at all except this useless, morbid ambient luminescence, but there: a similar patch of black at the back of Lance’s neck, right at the top of the spine. Right where Keith’s own ache is localised.

A little more gently he tips Lance’s head sideways to see as much as possible, but it’s like trying to read in a dark room. All there is is a shape, indistinct and infuriating. He wipes at the blood. Lance jerks back, then settles down again when Keith tightens his grip and gives him a firm shake.

There are lines of raised skin over the back of Lance’s neck. One by three inches, over the topmost ridge of his spine. Keith can’t make out the shape by touch alone, but it feels as if whatever mark there is was burnt.

“Damn it. Give me your hand.”

Lance does, gives Keith his hand palm up without protest, and it’s proof as good as any that he is not as okay as he’d like to be. The resigned compliance is far worse than Lance’s usual repertoire of annoyances. Keith wants to shake him until he’s back to being himself again, taking each breath only to have enough air to argue with Keith.

Keith takes Lance’s hand and puts it on his own neck, unwilling to feel the skin there himself, stopped by some atavistic revulsion at damaged flesh. Lance’s pinky finger snakes under the hem of his shirt; it makes Keith shiver. He can’t remember the last time he invited another person to touch him. Lance runs hotter than he does; his palm is warm and only a little damp. Keith clenches his teeth to keep from leaning into it.

In the dark, he sees the moment Lance’s eyes widen, the sclera so white as to be reflective. It’s the only answer Keith needs. He was marked, too.

“So we’re both branded,” he says, unnecessarily. Saying the words out loud makes him feel like cattle, and perhaps that’s what they are to the Galra. A lesser life form. Livestock.

Lance allows his hand to fall. The absence of his touch is more jarring than the touch itself. Instead of backtracking to his designated corner of the brig, Keith leans back against the wall next to him. He makes sure to keep a hand’s width of distance between their shoulders, having had enough physical contact for the day. It starts to worry him that they haven’t found any kind of entrance or exit across the entire cell: it makes him consider where their oxygen is coming from. If there is any.

“I wonder what they want to do with us,” says Lance. The nonchalance in his voice is so forced it makes Keith grind his teeth, the nervousness there catching. “Probably messed up experiments and pit fighting. Stick to what they know, right? Or maybe it’s like in the movies after all. Maybe there’s gonna be probes. You know. Spooky stuff.”

“What, this isn’t spooky enough for you?”

“There’s nothing going on,” Lance whines, and as little as Keith is looking forward to what seems like inevitable torture, he can admit that Lance has a point. Keith can’t figure out why they’re being kept contained for hours on end, without any attempts at intimidation or information gathering. Unless the point is for them to kill each other when the waiting gets to be too much.

“Do you remember getting branded?” he asks, staring straight ahead into the darkness.

He feels more than hears Lance shrug. “I remember following Red and getting shot out of the sky. A Galra cruiser took over my control systems. Pro tip, don’t get electrocuted by your own pilot chair, it blows. How much do you remember?”

“Not much. Why were you following me?”

“‘Cause you were getting your butt handed to you and Voltron needs both arms?”

“I was not,” Keith starts before biting his tongue, taking in a deep breath. Screw oxygen. He scowls at nothing, feeling blood rush to his face. “I would’ve been fine, you were probably the one that threw me off and got us both captured.”

“Oh, please, you were all,” Lance pitches his voice into a grating falsetto, “help me, Lance, only you and your big, strong lion can save my girly flailing ass.”

Keith presses the heels of his palms into his eyes until colour explodes behind his eyelids in bright starbursts. “For like five minutes,” he says, contemplative, having come out on the other side of anger and finding something near to solace in the normalcy of arguing, “I was almost glad I’m not here alone. I was wrong. This is worse than death.”

“Yeah, trust me, I’m not thrilled either.”

…

After six hours, Keith is ready to crawl out of his own skin. Patience is neither of their strong suits, and as Lance sprawls on the floor and starts humming off-key, Keith paces the length of the brig trying not to scratch himself bloody from the cabin fever making him itch all over. His footsteps echo throughout the cell, giving an impression of a large open space: nothing for the sound to bounce off of, nothing but emptiness. Fifteen by twenty feet. It’s a big cell.

“I’m gonna die,” says Lance, unseen picture of misery. Keith tries to avoid stepping on him, sticking to the opposite wall. It’s so quiet. He feels like he’s been waiting for something to happen for days. “We’re both gonna die of old age before they do anything. At this point I’d take the alien butt probes.”

“Shut up, I’m trying to think.”

In the dark, Keith can’t even see his feet; he keeps pacing, avoiding what seems to be the direction of Lance’s voice. Something isn’t right, something out of his reach. Something he’s missing. There has to be a significance to the length of time they’re left alone. The Galra don’t do anything by halves. Why would they capture them only to let them rot in a cell?

“Don’t strain anything, cowboy,” Lance says.

“Shut up, Lance.”

“Make me. Or better yet, you shut up.”

“Are you that much of a moron,” Keith snarls into the darkness, “or do you just not give a crap that we’re —”

The lights come on.

For a moment it’s so bright that Keith trips over his own feet, bangs both his knees painfully on the floor and scrapes one palm raw as he tries and fails to catch himself. He blinks, headache going from simmering to splitting in the nanosecond it takes for the light to permeate. Through effort alone, he swallows down the nausea rising in his throat.

He catches sight of Lance before he catches sight of anything else: half out of his flight suit, with blood smeared over his neck and dark circles under his eyes that make him look older, or like he’s coming off a sickness. The length of his body is arranged carelessly over the floor, as if something’s dropped him from a height and he couldn’t be assed to reassemble a shred of dignity. He turns on his side, shielding his eyes from the light with a pained noise caught somewhere in his chest.

For the first time since the moment he met him, Keith is happy to see him, even though the sight is far from pretty, even though he can’t look any better. If any more time passed, he would have started to wonder if Lance is there at all, or if he’s stuck forever in darkness, hallucinating as he slowly loses his mind.

He struggles to focus elsewhere. The lights are some eight feet off the floor; no wonder neither he or Lance could find anything by touch. Thin long bars framing the walls on all sides, off-white like fluorescents. They buzz like fluorescents, too, soft and barely there but enough to be noticeable; enough to grate.

The walls are an insipid green-tinged grey, as featureless illuminated as they were in the dark, stained and covered with dirt and uneven patches of dampness that Keith knows did not come from water. The brig might as well be some industrial basement in the middle of nowhere, a warehouse in the desert, the kind he’d seen and wished never to see again. They always smelled of the bleach used to wash out bloodstains.

When he looks at Lance again, it’s to find Lance looking back, with an odd kind of intensity.

“All right?” he asks, and manages not to twitch under the scrutiny.

“Yeah, I just —” He laughs, and shakes himself all over as he gets to his feet. “I was sort of wondering if I’ve been hallucinating you. Guess you’re really here, though.”

It’s like auditory déjà vu, except Keith only heard the words inside his head as he thought them, and all he can say in return is, “Same here.”

Lance walks over. Stripped of the cover of darkness, he can’t maintain the illusion of nonchalance: his shoulders are tense as he moves, but he still offers Keith a hand up, which is so unprecedented that for a moment Keith can only stare at the palm extended towards him like it’s a bear trap about to snap shut.

He lets Lance pull him to his feet.

“What now?”

“Now,” says Lance, “I want a better look at your tramp stamp,” and turns Keith by the shoulder. It’s hellishly uncomfortable to have him where Keith can’t see him, doubly so when he brushes Keith’s hair out of the way to peer at whatever the Galra have left etched into the skin. His hands are still warm, and Keith wants not to notice these things, but he’s running on low-level adrenaline and hyperawareness of every stimulus. He notices. At least the ache, when Lance gets his hands on the mark, has faded to a dull itch. As if something were only pulling at Keith’s spine from the inside, and no longer clawing.

After a moment’s examination, “It’s like a serial number, and an incision or something,” Lance says. “Can’t tell if there’s anything implanted, but we’ll have to ask Coran, he knows his nanomachinery. You know how I said all this wasn’t spooky? I take it the hell back.”

Keith bats his hands away, turning back. “I think we’re bait,” he blurts, as surprised as Lance looks to hear the words coming out of his mouth, but once he starts, he can’t push the idea back into the recesses of his subconscious. It makes sense. Before Lance can argue, he says, “No, look. Maybe they’re not doing anything because they’re already using us to get the rest to show up.”

“And what, take Voltron out for a joyride? The lions are tied to our biometrics.”

“Do we actually know that?” Keith asks, suspicion rising from the inertia it had fallen into amongst everything happening too fast, too bright. They’re standing close enough that Keith can get in Lance’s face, and it’s as satisfying as it always is, all their rough edges rushing towards a collision. “Come on, think a little. Do we know anything, except what we’re told? You said it yourself, the Galra took control of Blue. They made it electrocute you.”

“Well, yeah, but — hold on.” Lance frowns, focus shifting away from Keith. He stands very still, almost poised, a dog scenting air. “Do you hear that?”

Keith takes a step back, putting a sliver of distance between them, and tries to listen.

“You hear it too, right? There’s like a mmph.” Lance subsides, glaring from beneath knitted eyebrows, but doesn’t try to remove Keith’s hand from where it covers his mouth. In the resulting quiet, Keith finally hears it: a soft hiss, so faint it registers more as an absence of any real noise, static filling the depthless silence of the brig.

He looks up, trying to find a source for it. Above the lights, there’s something like mist. Greenish, like the walls, rising like vapour from a rapidly cooling surface, and that’s all the examination Keith gives it before Lance is following his gaze upwards and arrested realisation hits them at the same time.

They’re both scrambling to get to their flight suits before either of their movements register to Keith. The padding inside his flight suit has dried, so even though the armour has cooled, at least it isn’t sweaty. Keith can deal with the cold.

“What the hell is this, a neurotoxin?” Lance demands, as if expecting Keith to be able to give him an answer. He staggers a little and almost trips over himself, trying to reach for the safety catches at his back. Then: “Oh no. Oh, damn it. Keith, I left my helmet with Blue.”

“What? _Why_?”

“So you could ask a stupid question,” Lance says, throwing his hands heavenwards. “It’s not like I did it on purpose!”

“Have fun trying not to die,” Keith tells him. Keeping his eyes fixed on the gas slowly drifting down the walls of the brig towards them, he turns on his visor, and the room drowns in red. The visual affectation is a comfort for only a moment; in the next, he realises that the visor doesn’t extend to its full cover. He punches the safety release again, and another time for good measure. Nothing happens.

“Crap.”

“Have fun trying not to die,” Lance parrots in a mocking singsong, and it’s with the greatest self-restraint that Keith doesn’t move in to strangle him.

The flight suits are useless; he and Lance are no more protected from whatever the room is being doused in than they were out of them.

Keith says, “Maybe it’s knockout gas. Or a sedative. It could be truth serum. Barbiturates and scopolamine are used for interrogation. They could inject amphetamines at an interval. Maybe it’s some gas derivative —”

“Whoa, whoa.” Lance waves his hands, newly gloved, in a conciliatory fashion. The gesture only makes Keith’s blood run faster. “Easy there, tiger, we won’t get anywhere if your paranoiac ass talks itself into an aneurysm.”

Keith scowls. “It’s not paranoia if there really are alien invaders out to get us.”

For a beat Lance only stares at him. They crack up in the same instant, the laughter barking and slightly hysterical, but for a second Keith feels that they’re going to be all right. His flight suit seems less freezing. “Fine,” he says, “okay, fine. Touché or whatever. Let’s just —”

“— see what it does?”

“See what it does,” Keith agrees. He hates the inaction, hates only reacting to outside forces, but his bayard is gone, and his lion might be halfway to being disassembled into chunks of scrap metal. He slides down to the floor, keeping the wall at his back. After a moment Lance drops down next to him, and they both glare at the gas emitters until the air in the brig is thick with smoke and he can no longer see the seams connecting individual wall panels.

He anticipates losing his grip on consciousness and braces his hands and feet on the floor; no point in hurting himself more than he already has. The wait is maddening, but the axe staunchly refuses to fall. He hears Lance swallow and tries to even out his breathing, tries to synchronise their inhales the way they were both taught at the Garrison. Maybe at the same time, in different classes; maybe a few months apart. Sniper training. It’s strange that he still hasn’t shaken off the training.

Idly, he thinks that Lance would make a pretty lousy spotter. Good marksman, though. If they ever needed to snipe someone and found themselves in possession of an Earth rifle kit.

Idly, he realises he’s too calm for it to be natural. His flight suit isn’t warm inside: he’s breaking out in a fever.

“So, good news,” says Lance, voice a little strangled. “I seriously doubt that’s a killer neurotoxin. Or knockout gas.”

“Thanks, I figured that out.” His vision goes funny: he feels as though he’s looking at the brig, looking at Lance, through a layer of gauze, or heavy electronic distortion. Colours flash in the corners of his vision. His hands itch. He wipes at his face to occupy them with something, or else he’ll start to crack his knuckles until they break. There is something strange going on across Lance’s face, but Keith has never been good at parsing microexpressions, so he settles for watching the bunch and release of the tendons in Lance’s neck when he clenches and unclenches his jaw.

“Dude, you’re kinda freaking me out.”

Keith blinks himself into full awareness again. Lance’s face is far too close for comfort; Keith doesn’t remember drifting towards him. He swallows, and moves away.

His flight suit chafes, and it’s only the pain of it that makes Keith realise that he’s getting hard.

“Oh,” he says, the alien, unnatural calm evaporating as he slowly settles into his own body again only to feel like he’s intruding on something horribly intimate, “shit. Shit.”

Against every conscious instinct in his body, Keith lets his gaze follow down the line of Lance’s flight suit, but of course it’s ungiving alloy that betrays nothing. When he looks back up, Lance’s eyes are so wide they seem ready to drop out of the sockets. His irises are barely visible, consumed almost entirely by pupil. With a new dash of hysteria, Keith thinks: at least he doesn’t have brain damage.

“Did you just,” Lance starts, shrill, before he cuts himself off. “Okay, please tell me I’m having some kind of psychotic seizure and you didn’t check out my package.”

Despite the mortification Keith can feel spilling brightly over his face, he manages to choke out, “It’s not like there’s much to look at,” and staggers to his feet, trying his damndest to ignore Lance’s outraged gasp that turns quickly into something else. Cold air hits the exposed lower half of Keith’s face with a painful, needling sensation that is still nothing compared to the feel of his flight suit and the clothes underneath scraping over overheating skin.

He makes it to the other end of the room, safely out of range, and he collapses to the floor. It can’t be more than minutes since they were hit. He shouldn’t be feeling the effects of a drug, or whatever it is, so quickly. He’s not just hard, he’s so hard it’s beginning to hurt. Keith undoes the catches of his flight suit with shaking hands.

“What the hell are you doing?” Lance demands.

“It’s not helping,” Keith says, enunciating each word as he tries to cling to any semblance of control. “I just need —” He rips his gloves off last, and finally kneels, shivering, on the cold floor. His breath might be misting from temperature differences, or it might be that he’s inhaling and exhaling mouthfuls of the gas. Across the room, he hears a soft thump as Lance knocks his head against the wall. He places his palms flat on the floor.

“You were right,” he says, voice hoarse. Keith doesn’t want to know why his voice is hoarse. “You were so right. This is worse than death.”

“It’s you too, right? I’m not going insane.”

“Or we both are.” Lance runs his hands over his thighs, back and forth. In the flight suit, he can’t be feeling it at all. Keith watches him as if hypnotised, before he forces his gaze away. “Keith, sincerely and from the bottom of my heart, I’m sorry I mentioned butt probes.”

Caught off guard, Keith lets out a barking, choked-back laugh. “Look. It’s fine. We’re fine. We need to think about this logically.”

“I’m not feeling very logical right now. Logically,” says Lance, “I hate you. I mean, look at you. I hate you. So this isn’t logical, this is opposite land of logical.” The way _look at you_ sounds coming out of his mouth makes Keith want to bury his fingers in his hair. But this isn’t him. It’s not. He’s drugged, and even his thoughts, the half-realised images cut off in the middle before they can take shape, are alien. He might as well be trapped in a stranger’s skin.

“This has got to be a side effect. Unintended. Because we’re human. The gas is probably just a sedative, but it can’t have been meant for humans, the Galra couldn’t want —”

“Stop talking. Please.” Keith shuts his mouth. In the silence he can hear Lance taking in short, ragged breaths. “Wow. That’s…wow. Don’t do that again.”

“I wasn’t doing anything.”

“You were being all fiery and intense and crap, where your voice does that thing where — anyway. Don’t do it.”

Keith rubs at his face with both hands, thinking desperately about sepsis and battlefield amputations so that he doesn’t think about what precisely Lance heard in his voice, how precisely he reacted to it, what a short distance fifteen feet is. He could cross it in a heartbeat and see for himself the evidence of Lance’s grip slipping, wide pupils and fresh sweat. He remembers being taught the stages of death upon a human body being exposed to drastic atmospheric drops, because otherwise he will remember how warm Lance’s hands were. How good they’d feel in Keith’s hair, and how ungiving the floor would be under his knees.

A small noise tries to escape his throat, but he keeps it trapped there, fists his hands hard enough that the nails dig painfully into the meat of his palms. It doesn’t do anything.

He picks himself up, shifts around until he’s on all fours. Stretches his legs, supports his weight on still-clenched hands so that the floor digs into his knuckles, and starts doing pushups. There is a noise in his head like the buzz of static, as if the not-fluorescent lights ahead were ramped up and now the white noise bangs around his head. It’s that, or it’s the pound of blood.

“Keith, come on, this isn’t helping,” says Lance, pleading, after Keith’s breathing starts to drag heavily out of his lungs.

“If it’s a drug, it’s got to wear off.” Thirty-nine. Forty. “Help me pass the time. Talk about something.”

“What is this, the sharing and caring kumbaya hour?” He sighs. “Fine. Why did you join the Garrison?”

It’s as good a subject as any, so Keith stops counting his pushups and lets himself think before he answers. Eventually, “I wanted to fly,” he says, without inflection. “And when I got in the air, I wanted to go higher. You?”

“Huh.” Lance actually sounds curious, instead of only dazed. “D’you know, I thought the same thing? I wanted to be a fighter pilot, but jets weren’t enough. Like there should be…”

“More,” Keith finishes for him. His arms are beginning to ache, but it’s a good ache. It’s a good distraction. “Like breaking the speed of sound is nothing when you could be in orbit, with all that empty space, all that distance, everything so quiet, no one there to mess things up for you.” He remembers his first time outside of a simulator, nervously checking his oxygen tanks and fuel reserves, and smiles. “Nothing can touch you out there. It’s all I ever wanted.”

Silence. Maybe he bored Lance enough that he fell asleep. He keeps pushing himself, feeling sweat rolling down to the tip of his nose, landing on the floor.

“God, stop. Keith, I can’t —” A sharp hiss as Lance exhales. Keith refuses to look at him, or think about his hands, or imagine him sitting there in his flight suit, hard beneath its armour, flushed and half out of his mind. “Do you even know what you look like right now?”

Keith pauses and locks his elbows, staring at the floor, damp hair falling into his eyes. “What?”

“You’re there, and I can’t think, but I can’t look away, ‘cause then it sounds like you’re jerking off, and — crap.” His voice is cracked open. The sound of it, the words he’d chosen, all of it; Keith regrets taking off his flight suit, his trousers rubbing against oversensitive skin, maddening but not enough to be good. He glances at Lance from the corner of his eye, as if keeping him out of reach will help. Lance runs his hands through his hair. Even that makes something twist in Keith’s stomach, low in his gut. He’s wanted to do that for ages, thread his fingers through Lance’s hair, pull. “Forget it. Can you just come back here?”

Keith sits on the floor, cross-legged. “That’s a bad idea.”

“What could be worse than this?”

_Wanting you to touch me_ , Keith thinks but doesn’t say. He only raises his eyebrows, smiles grimly when Lance seems to let the unspoken answer sink in.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” Lance says, miserable, wrapping his arms around himself, digging his teeth into his lower lip hard enough to leave a welt that Keith wants to smooth over with the pad of his thumb. It would mean something. “It doesn’t. We’re drugged. We’re roofied.”

What’s fifteen feet? Keith can cross the distance and not embarrass himself. He can cross it and stay in control. He can cross it and not shove Lance to the floor, straddle his waist, peel him out of his flight suit and watch him shake to pieces, watch the flush that would inevitably spill itself over his collar bones and biceps and stomach like a bruise. All that skin. Sweat plasters Keith’s shirt to his back. He gets up.

Lance tracks his progression across the brig, eyes wide and throat working as he tries to swallow. Keith could sympathise; his own throat is parched. The room seems to grow hotter by the second. Lance’s fingers keep twitching. Maybe it’s unconscious, or maybe he’s physically fighting the urge to touch something. Himself, futile as that would be through layers of armour. Or Keith.

“Take off your flight suit,” Keith says, and immediately feels like a creep for even attempting nonchalance. If he wasn’t so painfully turned on, he’d have to be sick. “It, uh, feels better when you’re not baking in it.”

Lance gives him a long look. “You’re sure?”

“It’s fine,” says Keith, rolling his eyes, “I won’t swoon, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“Oh, good.” Lance’s voice drips sarcasm. “‘Cause I didn’t bring my smelling salts and fainting couch.”

Keith laughs, breathless. It tapers off into a sigh.

There is a rustle next to him as Lance moves. Keith knows he should look the other way, focus on the nondescript texture of the walls or the memory of the diving classes he’d taken in preparation for zero-g training, the feeling of being submerged and the weight of an entire ocean rushing in to crush his lungs. He should.

He doesn’t.

Lance isn’t much taller than him, two inches at most, but he handles his own body with an uncaring looseness of joints that gives an impression of height; as if he’d gain another few inches if he only stopped slouching. Now that looseness is exacerbated, and he moves with a lethargy that seems difficult to breathe through, like all his limbs are untethered from their sockets. He bends forward to undo the catches of his flight suit, hands pawing fruitlessly at his own back. His head falls, and with his hair not nearly long enough, even damp as it is from sweat, Keith can see the moment his eyes drift shut. Maybe in pain, likely not.

“Hold on,” he says, barely recognising his own voice, “let me.” He shifts closer, almost choking in his clothes and biting back a gasp when the inseam of his trousers presses against his erection. He flips the catches. Their fingers brush together; Keith sucks in a sharp breath. For a moment he thinks the sound echoes, but it’s only Lance gasping for air. Keith has barely touched him. He doesn’t want to stop.

No; he wants to stop. He can’t.

He undoes every clasp and safety until Lance’s flight suit parts at the back, almost organic, almost alive; like tissue and muscle falling away to reveal the spine exposed, but all it reveals is an expanse of skin visible through the soaked-through fabric of Lance’s shirt. The blood over the back of his neck is dried and flaking. Keith wants to wipe it off, to better see the shape of the brand left there. Feel the raised skin with his hands, with his mouth. He hates wanting it.

Fine tremors go through Lance’s body on each inhale. When Keith places one hand flatly on his back, in the middle of his spine, he moans. His head drops impossibly lower, exposing the line of his neck in some primal instinct. If Keith didn’t want to bite him there before, he does now. (He doesn’t, he doesn’t do these things; he doesn’t want it.)

He rests his forehead in the hollow between Lance’s shoulder blades, both of them burning up. Keith’s fingers fit frighteningly well into the spaces between Lance’s ribs, vulnerable as he struggles for breath. He’s not even touching bare skin. Under any other circumstances he would be disgusted at the feel of sweat-damp cotton against his hand, against his face. It’s not enough.

“Keith, please.”

Keith jerks back as if electrocuted, smarting at the sudden absence of contact, hating that he misses it. Before he can back off, perhaps stagger away to the other side of the brig where it won’t be better but at least it will be that little bit safer, Lance twists around, discarding his undone flight suit, and grabs Keith by the wrist hard enough to leave bruises.

He looks wrecked, sweaty and flushed and ruined, and Keith hasn’t even really touched him. His eyes are too wide, mouth bruised a bright red from how hard he must have been biting at his lips. The front of his shirt is plastered to his chest, and as Keith stares at him a single drop of sweat rolls down the side of his neck and into the hollow between his collar bones.

Keith feels more than hears the sound that tears itself from inside his throat, feels something inside him snapping like piano wire pulled too taut.

“Oh, screw this,” he growls, fists both hands in Lance’s shirt, and drags him forward.

They meet in the middle, that long-awaited collision running its course: Keith scrapes his teeth over Lance’s lower lip before kissing him, desperately awkward, but Lance lets out a moan that sounds it’s wrenched out of him by force. Half relief, half frantic need. He clenches his hands in Keith’s hair, pulling him ungently closer, as if trying to keep Keith from making a break for it; but this late, now that he’s felt actual skin on skin contact, Keith couldn’t stop if his life depended on it. It’s so messy. It’s so good. Keith wants to hate every second, driven as he is not by anything real but by a side effect and his synapses firing in all the wrong ways, connecting all the wrong dots. All of his control is frying at the edges.

But his hands are full and Lance is biting his mouth, dropping rationality and decorum in favour of shifting ever so closer, body heat making Keith break out in an altogether new sweat, and it scratches the itch. He can’t remember how long he’s been hard, how long the drug or sedative or toxin has been wreaking havoc in his system until every nerve ending could only scream for release. The world shrinks to needlepoint focus, until all that exists are the places where Lance is touching him, where he touches Lance, where his knees grind into the hard floor.

If Red ever gets fixed and Keith goes back to active duty, everyone is going to know how much he wants this. How much he’s wanted it. No, that’s not right; he didn’t want it before. Right?

It’s horrifying, the way they keep knocking knees and elbows and noses, the way neither of them can gather enough control to make it anything but sloppy and uncoordinated, the way it’s the best thing Keith has ever felt next to nosediving off the edge of the solar system and into a wormhole. Lance rocks back on his heels and manages to pull Keith on top of him without incident, landing with a soft thump of shoulder blades hitting the floor.

He grins up at Keith, the flash of teeth a bright contrast to his darkly bruised mouth. “Hey, you were right,” he says, breathless, tugging urgently at the waistband of Keith’s trousers, “feels pretty great without the flight suit.”

Keith digs his thumbs into the hollows of his shoulders, and Lance’s grin melts into an open-mouthed sigh. Keith doesn’t want to kiss him again. He does it anyway, pitches himself off the precipice with reckless abandon, all vestigial traces of lucidity drowned out by need. He licks the flat of his palm, only rational enough to remember not to hurt Lance, not unless he asks, and sticks his hand down Lance’s pants, wraps barely-slicked fingers around him. Lance drops his head to the floor, moaning into Keith’s open mouth.

It’s another heartbeat, two, before Keith has a vicious and graceless rhythm going — no teasing, no finesse — and in the next breath Lance finally emerges victorious from his clumsy struggle against Keith’s zipper, getting a firm handful.

Not like this, a vanishingly small part of Keith thinks. Not like this. He may be trying to voice the words, give them shape in the fevered air between them, but all that comes out is another raw noise he hates hearing himself make. He presses his forehead to Lance’s, breathing rapidly but in tandem, and lets himself shut down all thought, lets himself ride the wave.

It’s rushed when he comes, quick and dirty, but it doesn’t occur to Keith to feel anything but relief that at least they could take the edge off. Lance jerks his hips and spills all over his fingers a bare second later.

He collapses on top of Lance, who protests feebly before taking Keith’s weight. Both their breathing is slowly steadying. Keith can almost think again. The comedown leaves him hollowed out and unsatisfied. He tucks his face into the crook of Lance’s neck, chasing the smell of sweat and sex as if it could stave off the inevitability of having to face this. All of it.

Unseeing, he only feels the barely-there shift in the air when Lance lifts one hand. It hovers over the damp skin of Keith’s lower back, warmth radiating from Lance’s palm, but no touch comes; after a moment, he lets his hand fall elsewhere.

Keith picks himself up, body sore in ways that seem unlikely: his arms and thighs are shaking, just a little, not enough to be noticeable but enough to be another discomfort. He’s made of discomforts, the sum total of cooling sweat and soggy wet stains in his trousers. Cataloguing them is preferable to looking at Lance.

Once he’s up on his hands and knees, debating whether it would be worth it to stand, Lance rolls away to the side. Cold air rushes to meet the oversensitive skin of Keith’s exposed arms. It’s a small relief to feel alone in his body again, without the scorching need to be touched. With Keith’s head slowly clearing from the fog of blind want, all that remains is the uneasiness settling over him like gauze. He wipes his come-sticky hand over the back of Lance’s shirt.

“Ew, seriously? That’s disgusting.”

“You’ll live.”

Lance throws him a betrayed scowl over his shoulder that Keith elects to ignore. He studiously turns away, wipes his hands, does his zipper back up. Looking anywhere but at Lance, thinking about anything but the last small eternity of his life, proves far more difficult when Lance grabs the hem of his shirt and pulls it over his head. It leaves his back exposed: really exposed, not framed by clinging damp cotton, the flush beginning to recede, spilling from the top of his spine downwards across the expanse of tan skin. For someone so lanky he has definition to him, whipcord and utilitarian, not on the skinny side only by the virtue of muscle all cadets put on in training.

It has to be lingering side-effects of that gas that makes Keith stare, for much longer than he should. Than he wants to. Maybe the thing is not entirely gone from his system yet. With difficulty, he shifts his focus to the nearest wall.

He only sees Lance stretching his arms over his head from the corner of his eye. In a last effort at self-preservation, Keith pulls his knees up to his chest and doesn’t stand up. Lance’s shirt ends up in a tangle on the floor after he uses it as a towel, deeming it unsalvageable.

“Maaaaaan, I’m beat.” The forced equanimity is clear in his voice, grating like a layer of barbed wire pulled around the words. “This was great and all, like a solid seven out of ten, congratulations on your eye-hand coordination, but I’m pretty sure the boner gas has worn off now. You wanna get out of here?”

He’s not fooling anyone, least of all Keith, who sees clear as day the rigid line of his shoulders and the manic grin that radiates from him like another fever. But Lance is not his responsibility, and if Keith still feels a remote impulse to pull him to the floor and give him something he could rate as a ten out of ten performance, it’s the traces of the drug talking. It’s not him. He has everything under control.

“Yeah,” he says, pulling himself to his feet with the aid of the wall, registering a careful misplacement of Lance’s focus as he stares anywhere but at Keith, “let’s get the hell out.”


	2. Chapter 2

One of the panels has grooves deeper than the seams connecting the others, as though it could slide out. It’s in the centre of one of the walls, nestled right on top of the floor. Keith missed it in the dark, somehow. When he knocks on it, kneeling to press one ear to the cold surface of the wall, the interior sounds hollow. Nothing answers him from the other side. But the Galra aren’t exceptionally short, and whatever space might be revealed under the false panel doesn’t seem like it could be an actual exit. Oxygen delivery system, perhaps.

“A-ha!” Lance crows, as if he’d installed the false panel himself for no other purpose than to one-up Keith. “You’re welcome, little miss can’t-find-a-way-out.”

“Shut up. How does it…?” Scowling at the unmoving patch of wall, Keith considers their options: all their weapons taken away, and there is nothing to grab, no handhold. He runs his hands over the panel, smooth but porous like the rest of the brig. The groves seem to be filled with nothing more than dirt and dust. He presses his face to the floor, trying to look for even the smallest gap, and — there. Flash of red, like some kind of emergency light.

“Give me my helmet.”

“What? Get it yourself.”

“Lance,” he snaps, and Lance breathes in sharply, then obeys without another word. Keith isn’t sure what to do with the new information: that Lance’s name on his lips might now mean something it hasn’t before, have an impact. He can’t think about it. Lance’s feet return to his field of vision, and that’s about as much as Keith can stomach at the moment. His hands are getting sweaty again, and when Lance stalks over, brandishing Keith’s flight helmet, his hands slip over the polished alloy surface.

“Do you know what the visors are made of?” he says, looking for any seams near the front. There. He presses and the armour cracks harmlessly, splitting into component parts.

“Clearly not something resistant to you breaking it. I don’t know. Hard light or something?”

Keith looks up at him — shirtless and unimpressed — then drops his gaze. “Hard light isn’t a thing.”

“Neither is interplanetary travel at like a million times the speed of light, but here we are, despite every law of classical mechanics. Special relativity my ass. Hard light could so be a thing.”

In his own misguided, argumentative way, Lance is right. Keith forgets, sometimes, that he is not entirely dumb; that he passed the same exams and attended the same classes as Keith did, completed the same spaceflight training. In his defence, Lance has a habit of doing everything in his power to make people forget. He wields his smarter side like it’s something embarrassing to be hidden at all cost. When it emerges, it always comes as a small shock.

Keith bows his head lower over the disassembled helmet. “The deflector shield is just guided plasma,” he says. “Like the lions’ ion thrusters. Which means there’s either a microwave generator somewhere in here, or a laser. And if there’s either —”

“Ohhh. We’re making a plasma cutter. You could’ve just said so.” Lance drops down to the floor next to Keith, resting his chin on his hands as he watches Keith work. Keith is more aware than he should be of the precise distance between them, the angles at which they face each other: what would happen if he shifted just so. Every atom of air and particle of light between them catalogued as both obstacle and saving grace. Keith is painfully aware of how cold he is, now that the sweat coating his skin has cooled.

He feels the places where he’s had Lance’s hands on him as though each were branded, like his neck. His trousers are stiff with sweat and dried come. He can’t be thinking about this.

It takes ten minutes of silence before he finds and takes apart the laser that, combined with the visor, should be enough to make the most half-assedly put together plasma torch imaginable. The helmet won’t be salvageable, but Keith is sure there are spares somewhere on the castle ship, and even that might not matter much, given the state he’s last seen Red in.

Lance volunteers to try to cut through the hollow bit of wall, but Keith knows it should be him: he has the modicum of protection awarded by his shirt. He wraps his hand in the discarded remains of Lance’s, not that it could save him from third degree burns. Weld the fabric into his flesh, more likely.

“Uh. Good luck,” says Lance, taking a step back, then another.

Keith shrugs and gets to work. No one is more surprised than he is when he’s successful, and the superheated jet of plasma goes through whatever metal or alloy the wall panel is made of. The noise is piercing, and for a moment Keith can pretend he’s alone in the brig. It’s so simple. They’ve been here for hours, doing worse than nothing, when it could be so easy, if only Keith paid more attention to the texture of his surroundings in the dark.

When Keith is done cutting, Lance drifts back closer, and offhandedly kicks in a hole in the wall. The sawed-through panel drops unceremoniously inside, and stale cool air fills the space left behind.

“Air vents,” Keith says, disbelieving. “We’ll be crawling through air vents.”

Lance gives him an absurdly exaggerated bow, waving one hand at the vent entrance. It’s very dark inside, lit only by a faint, sourceless red sheen. “After you, good sir.”

…

The ship can’t be empty; it has to be swarming with hostile combatants, crowded like a current filled with schooling fish, but they see no one. The vents are a sprawling infrastructure, a city within a city, and all that is audible inside is the steady thrum — more a vibration than noise, registering to Keith in his teeth and joints, bypassing hearing — of the engines and generators that keep the ship from hurtling off the edge of whatever system it skirts, like the monstrous heartbeat of a vast, unknowable creature. The walls seem alive, slick with condensation and smelling faintly of stagnant air and decaying remnants of cellular waste.

It’s like being deep underwater, unaccustomed to the atmospheric pressure pushing at Keith’s insides, slowly crushing his bones. Heightened air density; it’s almost palpable, heavy and viscous, as though every molecule were oozing some alien liquid. It must be what passes for freshly recycled air to the Galra. To a human body, lethal in the long term. The deeper they go into the ship’s bowels, the worse it gets.

“They must have filtered the air specifically for humans,” says Keith, trying not to choke. His knees and elbows are already scraped raw from crawling down endless passageways.

There is a noise behind him, a slide and a thunk; Lance must have slipped. “Well,” he manages, his voice coming from a larger distance than when they set out, “we know they keep human prisoners. They probably learned a thing or two about what makes our heads explode and what doesn’t.”

They both fall silent. Keith tries not to think about the number of people of any species that died in the service of perfecting the Galra prison system. He tries not to wonder how long he and Lance might have left before exposure to hostile atmospheric conditions takes its toll, and what might happen once it does.

All of it is still easier, somehow, than the panicked white noise lurking on the edges of his consciousness along with the knowledge that there’s no taking back what happened in the brig.

…

They find a cavernous, dark hangar bay with Blue folded in on itself amongst Galra fighter jets and cruisers. Keith can almost feel the way Lance comes alive next to him as they drop out of the vent, barefoot to remain quiet. Blue is moored to the hangar deck and walls, as though any resultant defensive shield could keep it. Lance’s eyes go wider at the sight, reflecting the pale glow of machinery and emergency lights, and he looks at his lion with a muted but reverential affection that Keith has never seen before. No, not quite never; his frame of reference for Lance’s expressions has widened considerably, but Keith doesn’t want to think about it. He doesn’t want to remember, or draw connections.

He might as well be watching a long awaited reunion, made unbearably intimate when Lance runs his hands over the cool alloy of Blue’s armour and its optical shields spark, then gutter, in acknowledgement. Keith turns away, less to keep watch for any patrols or stray pilots and more to give Lance privacy.

“Hey, buddy,” says Lance, for the first time since they woke up in the brig sounding happy, without reserve or complications. “Hey. Sorry it took us so long. I guess Galra hospitality isn’t anything to write home about, so what say you and me and Keith over there get out of this craphole?”

Something like a purr reverberates through the floor, nearly subsonic.

“Yep, thought so. Give us a minute and we’ll find Red, and we’re gone.”

“We don’t have to —” Keith stops, shifting irritably. He hates intruding, doubly so when the intrusion is on a guy and a robot. It’s so stupid. He awkwardly puts his hand over the alloy lining Blue’s massive jaw. It’s so much bigger than Red is — was, maybe. “We don’t have to look for Red now, we can just get out and come back with reinforcements.”

“What? No. What?” Lance stares at him, dumbfounded. It’s the first time he’s maintained eye contact with Keith for more than an agonised second since it all started. “We’re taking the red lion, what are you talking about?”

“Lance.” He twitches at the sound of his name, again. Keith doesn’t know what to do with the power he finds himself holding, to provoke a reaction with just Lance’s name rolling off his tongue. He doesn’t want it. “It was in pretty bad shape when I saw it. It won’t fly.”

“So we’ll tow it back to our system, I don’t care. What the hell is wrong with you? You’re its paladin, you have a _connection_.”

But Keith wasn’t chosen by Red, Red was chosen for him by someone else. He doesn’t have the kind of connection that Lance has to his lion, effortless and natural, and yet he’s terrified of seeing the evidence of Red’s destruction with his own eyes. They wouldn’t be here if he hadn’t failed so spectacularly. If his lion is beyond repair, a childish part of Keith wants to be spared from watching its end.

He recognises the impulse as just further evidence of how scrambled his head is: synapses firing in all the wrong directions, the inside of his skin feeling so wrong he wants nothing else but to go home and peel it off, rip it off, with a scalpel if he has to.

Lance wouldn’t understand. The longer they argue, the longer they have to stay here.

“Fine,” Keith snaps, and turns on his heel, stalks off into the darkened depths of the hangar in search of his lion.

He finds it not long after.

Red is a tangled mess of wires and alloy plates, misshapen from superheating, still somewhat whole and recognisably itself but beyond usability. The parts are folded and stacked, so the whole of it seems very small compared to its actual size. Vulnerable. It lies within an area that feels far warmer than the rest of the hangar, and Keith can’t help but imagine an incinerator room close-by, waiting to receive the mangled remains of his lion. He feels like an absolute monster.

He has no idea if Red can hear him, but he apologises to it, out loud, the thought of leaving it now unfathomable. He waits for a spark of recognition, or life, in its optics; for a second, brief enough to be his imagination, he thinks he can hear a low rumble from deep within the fragged machinery.

“It’s okay,” Keith says, wretchedly awkward as he tries to pat one enormous paw. “We’re getting out of here, buddy. You’re going to be okay.”

The air explodes in a blare of sirens.

“Oh, so now they wanna party!” Lance yells across the hangar. His voice is barely audible over the deafening shriek of the alarms. “Dude, come on!”

Keith runs back the way he came, uncaring that his footsteps are loud enough to be easily trackable now that he’s not trying to be sneaky. There is yelling, far to his left and behind him, but ahead is Blue, glorious and huge, optics glowing as it uncurls from its crouch, one limb after another, until it stands at its full height, poised to fly. Lance lets him in at the back. In the exact same second whoever is chasing Keith starts firing, so all he can do is dodge low and throw himself face-first towards the hatch and hope that Blue catches him, the impact knocking the breath out of him.

“They’ve got Red over there,” he shouts as soon as there is air back in his lungs. Actual air, atmospheric pressure and oxygen levels adjusted to sustain human life. The hatch slides shut behind him and Blue lurches forwards. Keith can only resign himself to being tossed around like a piece of luggage as he tries to navigate his way to the pilot compartment.

Lance barks out a laugh. The comms vocoder scrambles it into a flat, metallic buzz. “Not for much longer.”

The escape itself is a blur, Keith’s head pounding from the knocks he’s taken inside Blue, but mostly from Lance’s piloting. They hit more walls than should be likely while Lance complains loudly about spaces too cramped for the unconstrained majesty of his lion. Automatic and pulse rifle fire skirts off Blue’s chassis. Keith emerges into the pilot compartment vaguely nauseous from the breadth of Lance’s evasive manoeuvres.

He barely has time to straighten before visuals from the hangar trickle in and Lance is making Blue pounce, nosediving to get its claws on Red. The impact throws Keith half across the cockpit, and he ends up with his face mashed against the display monitor, getting ticklish from the buzz of ionised holographs.

“So long, suckers,” Lance crows, as Blue body-checks the gate of the hangar launching bay with enough force that even inside, Keith can hear the agonised shriek of metal, and then nothing at all.

Blue’s interior doesn’t go silent; it can’t, pressurised and full of oxygen eager to conduct vibrations. But as they hurl themselves into open vacuum, it moves in to crush every sound that it can reach like something living, something malicious, reaching out to swat a fly. Blue’s movements become fluid, unlimited by air pressure and atmospheric friction, rapidly gaining momentum with nothing around to temper it.

“Ion thrusters are a go. We are on the move.” Lance flips all diagnostic switches and grins at Keith, as if nothing had happened, before he remembers and quickly averts his gaze. “You can call me Leonardo.”

“Why would I?”

“‘Cause that was…art? Never mind.”

Keith looks out of the optical shields, watching the Galra ship shrink as they gain distance. It’s massive, flanked on both sides by a spattering of small flagship cruisers. The hangar bay is still visible, a gaping maw in the ship’s side still vomiting atmosphere and debris. In another minute, it looks like a bullet hole. Keith waits for pursuit, for any or all of the cruisers to launch into a chase, but he knows rationally that they wouldn’t be able to match Blue’s velocity. The lions’ tech is unparalleled. That their pilots’ skeletons don’t get liquefied from stacking g-forces is a minor miracle that Keith prefers not to dwell on.

He drops down on the other side of the pilot chair with his back to it, exhausted now with the immediate danger gone, adrenaline slowly beginning to simmer down. He almost managed to forget how disgusting his clothes feel, sweated through and worse. Being unable to do much of anything, locked out of Blue’s auxiliary systems and sentenced to only watching Lance fly them back to the castle ship, wherever it might be, brings all the rest of it to the forefront.

“Okay, here goes nothing.” Lance switches on the wide comm channel, and it comes to life with a crackle of static. “Uh. Mayday, mayday, mayday, we’re stranded in space and I don’t know where we are, oh god will someone please save us. Over.”

Seconds tick past. Lance sends out the call again.

A full minute passes before the radio sputters, and Allura’s voice comes in. Even flattened by the distance of transmission, vocoder working double time to relay information scattered between what could be galaxies, Keith can hear how worried she is. “Lance? Oh, you’re alive! Is Keith with you? How are your lions?”

“Yes, yes, yes, and — Blue is fine, Red is, well. Red is non-operational. But we’re okay, Princess, everything is fine. Say everything’s fine, Keith.”

From his position at the back of Lance’s chair, Keith mutters an affirmative.

“We were going out of our minds with worry,” says Allura, with a tinge of rebuke. “Your biometric signatures kept fluctuating and finally went offline two hours ago; I thought you’d died. Never, ever go off the grid like this again. Pidge and I were able to track your lions back to one of the outer rim systems. I’m going to launch a wormhole for you to jump through. Coran is uploading the coordinates to you now. Stay on course this time, please.”

Lance laughs weakly. “Got it. Thanks. Sorry for, um, worrying you guys. Out.”

The connection fizzles out, and Lance exhales in relief, but says nothing. It’s better this way. Keith can’t wait to be out of here, away from the gravity still pulling at his bones and trying to aim him in the least convenient direction. He’s going to get checked out once they get back, make sure there is not even a speck of that gas lurking in his system. Then, he’s going to forget about the whole thing. They’re both going to forget it. Everything will go back to normal.

Blue glides through dead space between unknown stars, holding on to Red with a resolve that Keith finds soothing. He doesn’t know if his lion will get repaired. For the moment, the prospect feels remote, easy to dismiss in a haze of crippling fatigue. Everything will be fine.

…

Alarms go off as soon as the landing bay is repressurised and Blue spits them out down its front hatch. A full welcome committee is gathered, though all are covered head to toe. Allura covers her mouth in abject horror at the sight of Red and its insides spilling across the hangar deck. A respectful step to the right and behind her, Coran reads through the display of a handheld scanning device. It must have activated the alarms. Whatever Keith and Lance were doused in still clings. Stood at half attention in front of Allura, Coran and the other paladins, Keith feels naked. No flight suits, streaked with dirt and sweat; he and Lance must present a less than appealing picture.

He doesn’t look at Lance.

Hunk and Pidge move in tandem in their direction — no, in Lance’s direction. They were teammates before Keith, before the lions. Before either of them can take more than a step, Shiro stops them with an outstretched arm.

Right, Keith thinks. Quarantine.

“You’re positively soaking in Galra biochemical waste,” Coran observes with morbid delight. “Did they sneeze on you competitively? In any case, much as the both of you are in dire need of a shower, I’m afraid a trip to medical will have to come first. There’s no telling what all this could do to our systems.”

“We were gassed,” says Lance. Keith wants to hit him. There’s no need to volunteer any information unless they’re asked. “With something. But hey, it didn’t work.”

Allura frowns. “It’s common for Galra slave ships to sedate new prisoners for ease of transport.”

“But it didn’t work,” says Lance, grinning thinly.

Slave ships. Keith glances at Shiro without meaning to. All he gets in return is a small, tight smile. He and Lance could have ended with a still shorter end of the stick, though the knowledge is a cold comfort. The brand on Keith’s neck itches with renewed discomfort. He almost forgot about it. Not quite, but almost.

“Let’s get you guys to medical,” says Shiro, his tone a fair if misplaced stab at reassurance. “Make sure everything is in working order. And then you can shower as many times as you want.”

“So many times.” Lance sighs, dreamy. Keith physically stops himself from looking at him. “Dibs on all the hot water on this ship. All of it.”

Without a word, Keith stalks off towards the med bay.

…

It’s a small blessing that they’re taken to separate exam rooms. Coran says something vague about contamination and suggestibility. The room is pristine, white, and very bright: a marked contrast to what Keith’s already gotten used to aboard the Galra ship, with its low lights and smoothly porous surfaces, the pervasive suggestion of dampness. Keith doesn’t thank Coran for the relative privacy, but a weight falls from his shoulders when the automatic doors slide shut and, for the first time in what feels like a fractured eternity, Keith isn’t intensely aware of where Lance stands in relation to him. Distance, angles; bodies in motion.

“Who is doing Lance’s exam?”

Coran waves his hands indistinctly. “Pidge with Allura’s supervision, I believe. I’d wager he’s in good hands, no need to worry.”

“I’m not worried,” says Keith. Even the thought of Lance makes him itch all over.

He strips out of his sweat-soaked clothes while Coran turns away to run preliminary diagnostics. That done, he gestures for Keith to sit on the edge of an open surgery pod, in absence of gurneys. Keith sits, and immediately starts to shiver at the cold of it. It’s like sitting on marble.

He doesn’t see the injection coming. He jerks back, surprised, at the prick of a needle in the side of his neck.

“Ow, what was that for?”

“It’s antibiotics,” says Coran, breezing past on his way to get more equipment the purpose of which is beyond Keith. “I don’t know if you’re aware, but there is an open wound on your neck. You’re covered in biohazardous material, the last thing we need is an infection.”

“You can get it out, though, right?” Keith swallows. He fights the urge to pick at the brand, try to feel if there are scabs already forming. If it’s still bleeding. “The mark. I don’t want it.”

Coran pauses, shifts from foot to foot. Keith knows what he’s about to say before he says it: “I, well. I’m afraid it’s quite permanent. The Galra don’t inject pigment into tissue, you understand, the skin is discoloured on a cellular level. Right down to the bone.”

“So prisoners can’t just cut out the marked skin,” Keith finishes for him, and Coran nods in relief. Perhaps he thought Keith would have a meltdown.

“Precisely, yes. Now, if you’ll raise your arms, we will commence the scan.”

He does it with a device that looks like handheld UV scanners that Keith remembers from Earth, complete with a cold blue glow that seems to buzz ever so slightly at the edges of his hearing. The light paints his skin a sickly, pallid colour, and raises the hair on his arms. He thinks, childishly, that it would be better if Coran wasn’t covered head to toe in protective gear: his expression looks like a mirror of itself behind the deflector shield, too pale and too lifeless with the scanner throwing long, twitching shadows over the panes of his face.

Keith tries to sit still and not shiver too much, obeying directions to shift this way and that, to stand, to move; bend down, straighten back up, open his mouth for a DNA swab. It’s mechanical and pointless and uncomfortable. He feels as naked as he is, the layer of _biochemical waste_ coating his skin almost palpable. As if every cell in his body wanted out, everything wrong and toxic and not entirely his. Keith grits his teeth and lets himself be examined like a piece of decaying roadkill.

“Hmmm, yes. Everything seems to be in the correct order. Or, well, it doesn’t look like there is anything wrong with you that won’t be fixed by a few ticks in the decontamination chamber.” Coran finally turns the light off, reading over whatever strings of incomprehensible Altean text are rolling across the display screen. “Traces of an airborne sedative, biohazards. Did you roll around in a garbage tank?”

“Air vent.”

“Galra ships don’t have air vents,” Coran says with a gentleness that borders on condescension. “They have garbage disposal chutes.”

Keith remembers touching those walls. A little slick, a little damp, smelling a little like rot. The sense memory is enough that he gags, but he swallows past the bile in his throat. Coran ignores him.

“Otherwise it’s just sweat, dirt, and…huh. Oh.” Coran peers at the display, then at Keith, and back again. Heat rushes to Keith’s face. He knows what else would come up in a scan like that, and the memory still playing across the insides of his eyelids any time he shuts his eyes makes him weak-kneed with humiliation. “You and Lance must have had quite the celebration upon escaping. Only to be expected, really.”

“It’s not like that,” Keith says, horrified.

“Right, right, of course not. None of my business, anyway.” If Coran’s face wasn’t covered, Keith is certain he would tap the side of his nose, knowing and conspiratorial.

Arrested realisation hits all at once: Allura and Pidge will know, too. They will see the evidence on Lance’s body. Hell, they might see fingerprints.

“Are we done here?”

“Right! Yes. Off you go to the decontamination chamber. And remember to close your eyes and cover your ears, keep those puny human blood vessels from bursting.”

Being gassed in the decontamination chamber is nothing like being gassed in the Galra brig. If it was even a brig, and not a garbage disposal unit that Coran seems certain he spent some time in. It’s worse. The room itself is tiny, freezing and windowless, and once it gets flooded Keith has to keep himself from letting out any noises. He barely has time to cover his ears, squeeze his eyes tightly shut. The gas is biting, so cold that the sensation of it is more like being burned. Like liquid nitrogen. It feels as though his skin might melt off his bones, liquefy and pool at his feet in clumps of boiled tissue.

Keith waits for it to be over and tries not to throw up, morbidly glad that Lance must be going through the same process.

…

Back in his quarters, he showers four times. Every time is better than the last, until he feels almost like himself again, almost human. Exhaustion pulls at him from all directions; it seems unreal that they spent less than twelve hours total aboard the Galra ship. But he has a reminder burnt into his skin. At least it isn’t somewhere he has to look at.

He awards himself two hours of downtime: lies naked on his bunk, presses the heels of his palms into his eyes, doesn’t think about anything but the fact that he survived. They survived.

Even in the dimness of his quarters, a ring of faint bruising is visible over his left wrist where Lance had grabbed him. Keith stares at it until he thinks he can make out the exact shape of the fingerprints, then fits his own hand around the discoloured skin. Tight enough that his thumb and middle finger touch, meeting right atop the patchwork of thin veins running parallel to the line of his forearm. He wonders if he’d like that to happen again, getting grabbed and pushed around, or if it was the drug talking. He wonders if he’d like it if anyone but Lance did it.

He lets go of his hand, trying to even out his breathing before it can spiral out of control.

“Damn it.” His voice echoes in the otherwise silent room.

No one answers, but then, he’s not exactly asking a question.

…

The Altean castle talks in a different way to the Galra ship. The noise is still there, a constant and unwavering chatter of metallic creaks and groans, hundreds of thousands of tonnes of machinery moaning with the effort of not simply shaking apart into the void. It’s still there; but it’s more comforting, somehow, as if soaking up the light of alien suns lent the ship a vibrancy. A sense that it could sustain life, and not just ingest it.

Even without a sky above him, even when ‘above’ is a figure of speech and spatial relativity laughs in the face of human concepts of direction, Keith could get used to it. The one thing he wishes he could change is that there is no way to get lost. For a structure vast enough to contain all the lions as a matter of course, it can seem cramped like enlisted barracks.

Sometimes, he likes it. It’s easy to find what he’s looking for, when what he’s looking for is a fight: Lance tends to hole up in the hangar bay, crooning at his lion like a proud mother hen, or with Pidge and Hunk, doing nothing productive that Keith could discern. Then other times it would be Lance, stumbling across Keith running practice routines with AI-controlled androids. Keith could never tell if he meant to intrude, looking to scratch that familiar itch, or if the ship anticipated the need and directed him to the likeliest place.

On his way to the mess Keith traces the corridor wall with one hand. He’s already memorised the texture. In a few months, he’ll start forgetting what the desert felt like. In a few years — well, if he lives that long, he’ll see what he forgets.

The others are already in the mess, split into a configuration that Keith has learned is typical: Lance, Pidge and Hunk close together and laughing or teasing, acting like an elaborate mechanism made from three component parts that would never work if even one were to go missing; Allura, Coran and Shiro, less vibrant but still close-knit. And Keith, not really part of either group.

Hunk spots him first, hanging around awkwardly in the doorway, and waves him over. Shifts his own chair to make space. It puts Keith between him and Lance. Of course it does.

Lance is shovelling food into his face like there is no tomorrow, for once too hungry to complain about the consistency and colour of the protein scramble. Keith’s stomach growls just from watching it.

“It figures the Galra wouldn’t maintain any kind of dietary standard for you guys,” says Hunk, smiling in sympathy. “That’s how you can tell they’re totally, completely, hands down evil.”

Keith smiles back. He catches Lance’s look before he can drop his gaze back to his food.

“Actually, I think it’s that what they eat is probably toxic to us in some way.” Pidge gestures with a fork. If she’s noticed the silent exchange, she doesn’t let on. “You know, like feeding chocolate to dogs.”

Lance frowns. “Wait, what happens if you feed chocolate to dogs?”

“They die,” says Keith.

“The fact that you know this is suspicious as hell.”

“What? It’s common knowledge. The fact that you _don’t_ know —”

“Sure, like some weirdo freak of nature —”

“So now I’m a freak? That’s rich, coming from —”

“Guys! Stop.”

Shiro’s voice might as well be paper-thin, for all the difference it does. He tries again, louder. Lance settles down first — newly out of the Garrison, still used to obeying orders; still, fundamentally, reacting to a ranking officer like a cadet — and Keith follows, short of choice. It’s only then that he realises he’s moved halfway out of his chair. That given half an excuse he’d have his hands fisted in Lance’s t-shirt.

It’s not that which scares him. It’s that he can’t tell whether he’d shove Lance away, or pull him forwards.

He sits back down.

“You keep knocking each other’s knees,” says Allura. “I know you don’t mean it, but it could still affect your performance in the field. Please, try to get along.”

“Knocking knees.” Pidge frowns. “Is that like pulling pigtails?”

“Your species don’t have tails,” says Allura, with a frown to mirror Pidge’s.

Lance puts his fork down. He says, “We get along fine, Princess, thanks ever so much for the concern and the nagging,” and gets up to leave.

The silence in the wake of his departure lasts only a moment, broken too quickly by Hunk and then Coran as they launch into a comparison of English and Altean metaphorical devices. Their interest sounds forced, and Keith wonders with creeping gloom if all that effort at pretending normalcy is for his benefit. No one’s looked at his neck, or Lance’s. No one has mentioned either of their exam results. No one has said a word, in fact, and Keith can feel the discomfort percolating in the mess like water put to a slow boil.

They’ve been gone a few hours. They might have been gone for years. Perhaps it isn’t a change in the others that Keith registers so keenly; perhaps it’s the change in him. He needs to have it under control.

“Princess.” He says it too loudly, startling Hunk into silence. “Is there, uh. Is there any word on Red?”

“I’m going to head to the docking bay shortly. Truthfully, it might take some time for us to get an approximation of the amount of repairs needed. What happened, Keith? I’ve never seen a lion of Voltron in such a state.”

No one is eating. They’re too busy trying to watch Keith without being obvious about it, as though he couldn’t feel the whole room’s attention landing squarely between his shoulders.

“I underestimated their firepower.” It’s far easier to say than the truth: he overestimated his skill. “Maybe it was a trap, or I just got into the middle of something else, but it was like a whole cavalry fleet was out, guns blazing. Blue got there after me, and I think Red got caught in the crossfire.”

Allura winces. “Well, I am glad that you’re both back now. We’ll begin work on the red lion as soon as possible. And no more venturing out by yourself, or giving chase to Galra scouting ships,” she adds, but the admonishing tone from earlier is gone. She just sounds relieved, and Keith wants to dig himself a hole and hide in it for making her worry. It’s a strange, alien feeling, both the guilt and the knowledge that he has people who worry about him.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Something begins to shift in her expression at the form of address, but Keith looks away before he can find out if it’s pity or disappointment.

He wants out; he can barely breathe past all the tension in the air, thick and clinging as it is. In the end there’s nothing keeping him there, so he excuses himself. If any of the three people who know what really happened look at him oddly, or knowingly, he doesn’t stop to think about it. He walks out with his back straight and chin up, glad that the mark on his neck won’t be visible from beneath his hair. He’s never been happier about keeping it non-regulation.

…

There is no defensible way of framing the direction he takes as the ship’s more or less subtle social engineering: it’s all him. He pulls up a deck layout display, the first he can find. It shimmers a whitish blue as his fingers skirt over and through it; blinking red dots stand in for the positions of each crewmember based on the feedback from their subcutaneous tracking devices. Four in the fourth level mess hall, one in the northeast companionway leading towards the bridge. One in the hangar bay. Keith knows where he wants to go, despite himself and against all logic or reason.

He can hear Lance long before he sees him, or his lion. A steady, monotonous clang echoes across the hangar bay, bouncing off the walls so many times its source is drowned in cascading noise. Keith doesn’t need to guess at the source. There is only one place where Lance would be hammering away at pliant alloys without getting shocked within an inch of his life.

Keith climbs into Blue without a word, navigating its mechanised innards by touch and memory. It’s warm inside, as though the lion hasn’t yet cooled down after the wormhole jump.

When he finds Lance, it’s on the level directly below the pilot compartment, more of a glorified shelf than a room, far too low to admit anyone standing. The deck is barely visible beneath tangles and and puddles of wires, glistening with grease and oil. Lance is sprawled on his back, elbow-deep in circuits and machinery, hammer in one hand and a bunch of nails sticking out of his mouth like cigarette butts. The only light is falling in from the pilot compartment, faint and blue, fractured into a thousand rhombus-shaped patches that throw a mosaic of shadows over Lance’s body. His legs, too long to fit in the cramped space, jut out into the companionway. Keith knocks his feet aside as he climbs down the ladder.

“Mmph,” says Lance, which Keith elects to treat as a hello.

“How’s that sulk working out for you? Did you get the juvenile rebellion out of your system yet?”

Lance spits out the nails. He lifts his head and glares at Keith across the length of his body. “Since when do you speak in complete sentences?”

Keith scowls. It accomplishes little: Lance only snorts, doglike and graceless, and goes back to hammering at Blue’s guts as if trying to punch a hole through the hull. If he has showered after they returned from the Galra ship, Keith can’t tell any more. A splash of oily black fluid drops to his face from one of the circuits and leisurely slides down his cheek before he wipes at it, smearing the dirt over his face.

“How’s the damage?” Keith asks.

Lance shrugs. He moves his legs to let Keith sit down more comfortably in the tiny space. “Transmission lines are shot, so coolant doesn’t get to the extremities. I wanna get it done before we fly out again.”

“It’d look bad if your arms and legs caught fire,” Keith agrees.

The wiring above Lance spits out more fluid. Some must get in his mouth: he sputters, jerking back, and bangs his head against the deck. Pilots shouldn’t have to fix their machines, Keith thinks, despairing. That’s what engineers are for, and if the records he lifted from the Garrison cadet data servers were correct, Hunk is one hell of an engineer. The lions’ stubborn refusal to respond to anyone but their paladins is both ingenuous and irritating. Maybe Alteans used to have engineering corps allowed to work on them, but Allura never volunteered any information. Keith is not about to press her.

“Sure,” says Lance easily, “it’d be a real tragedy if I wasn’t there to save all of your asses from certain death.”

For a moment, Keith can pretend that nothing has changed and everything is normal, and he and Lance are sparring without any real heat to it, by reflex. It’s so easy, and so easy to take for granted. Lance is the only other person who probably has an inkling of what’s gnawing at Keith’s insides, gets the wrongness and the weirdness and the sensation as if the world has titled ever so slightly in an unprecedented direction. Tilted, or was pushed. Everything out of alignment, leaving Keith off-balance in turn.

“Are you okay?” he blurts, listens to the ominous silence from the tangled mess of wires. “I mean side effects, all that. From — you know.”

“Yep.” The clanging resumes, with doubled tenacity. Even without seeing his face clearly, Keith knows that Lance is glaring at nothing in particular as if it had wronged him. “All gone, everything back to normal. I’m great. Just super.”

There’s a crack of electricity, followed by a loud curse, followed by Lance shoving at the grate haemorrhaging cables above his head. “Keep the claws to yourself, asshole, I’m trying to fix you!”

Refusing to dissect the impulse for any kind of motive, Keith sighs, and crawls into the tiny space on his hands and knees, then elbows and knees, hands slipping on the transmission fluid and grease spilled everywhere. He sidles in beside Lance, caged in from all sides by grates and dirt and circuits; there is barely enough room to inflate his lungs without knocking into something. His feet poke out into the companionway, dirty white sneakers next to Lance’s blue. Of course he would colour-coordinate to match his lion.

“Give me that before you hurt yourself,” Keith says, holding out his hand. “I swear they shouldn’t let you out of your quarters without adult supervision.”

Lance passes him the hammer. Keith makes sure their hands don’t touch, but he can’t help looking: Lance’s hair sticks up in all directions from the force of the shock the circuits gave him. He smells like motor oil and, oddly, propellant. There is no firing range aboard the castle ship, which means he must have been tinkering with something explosive. It’s a bad idea to be this close, with that gravitational pull still exerting its force over Keith, but if he chickens out, if he lets this thing between them mean more than it has any right to mean, he’ll never be in control again.

It’s all he wants: to be in charge of himself. To let nothing touch him.

“Anything else, boy wonder?” Lance asks.

“Shut up. Is that a lead-in to a ‘your mom’ joke? Shut up.”

Lance barks out a laugh. It sounds flat, too loud, in the cramped space. “Make up your mind! Talk, shut up, talk — you should’ve stayed at the Garrison, you’d make a great officer. So do I shut up or do I answer the question? ‘Cause I’ve got, like, four comebacks you’ll definitely wanna hear.”

“I was sort of hoping your tiny brain would fry trying to parse a paradox.” Keith finds where one of the transmission fluid lines is damaged, one of the circuits bleeding the same black oil that Lance has now smeared over his face. He picks up one of the nails Lance spat out, and starts hammering it into place.

“It wasn’t even a paradox. Good reference, though.” Lance affects a tone of voice that Keith can only think of as haughty. “What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object? Beep boop. Red alert. Brain circuits frying. Whoosh.” He spreads his fingers, miming an explosion.

“That’s a flawed premise,” says Keith. He tries to smother the grin pulling at the corners of his mouth. “They can’t both exist at once. Logically, if there’s an immovable object, then there can’t also exist a —”

Lance groans. “Bro, spare me the nerd olympics.”

“Says the guy that just told me my paradox isn’t a paradox.”

“Your face is a paradox.”

For a beat, Keith is lost for words. He starts laughing before he can stop himself, tension he didn’t even realise still clung oozing out of his body with every shaky breath. There is not enough space for him to turn fully, so he just turns his head to better laugh in Lance’s face, catch his eye and make him laugh until their hysteria bounces back and forth and they can settle into the old shape of their bones, the old vitriolic camaraderie, everything in its right place.

Lance is staring at him, unmoving, eyes a little too wide. Keith never thought the deer in headlights things was anything but a figure of speech, but now he sees where someone must have gotten the idea. Lance looks at him as if Keith were an incoming freighter, the brakes were shot, and he were tied to the tracks. It doesn't matter that Keith is bad at filtering microexpressions: Lance does nothing by halves.

“What?” he says, suddenly and overwhelmingly self-conscious, wave of unease sparking irritation. His neck itches.

Lance blinks. “What? Nothing.” But he starts shifting around, knocking knees and elbows into Keith’s side at the most painful angles, and slowly manages to dig himself out of the crawl space.

There is nothing Keith can do but stare after him, cold in a way he can’t quite explain — it isn’t as though the temperature has dropped. Circuitry and the deck are digging into his back, and he wants desperately to go after Lance and shake him until he starts making sense. It’s not an altogether alien feeling. “What?” he says, again, louder.

“This,” says Lance, gesturing with both hands at himself, at the innards of Blue all around them, at Keith crammed tightly beneath the pilot compartment and left in the dark, “is a bad idea. I’d know, I’m full of them. But this, right here?” He swallows, shifting from foot to foot, settles again with his hands on his hips, haloed by the faint sheen falling into the companionway. “This is a level of bad heretofore unknown to mankind. I need a break. I’ll see ya.”

He leaves without another word, climbing up the companionway ladder, all graceless limbs and rigid spine and the tense line of the shoulders.

Keith stares at the empty space for a minute, then another. When it’s clear that Lance is not trying to wait him out, won’t be lurking with a bucket of ice water to empty over Keith’s head when he crawls out after him, Keith lets his head drop to the deck. The hammer falls next to him, obscenely loud in the sudden silence, and Blue’s circuitry keeps sweating coolant and transmission fluid, unconcerned. It doesn’t purr, but neither does it electrocute him.

It’s with a half-realised, half-perverse sense of doom that Keith knows what happened: that he pushed in the wrong direction, tipping over whatever harebrained sandcastle of a bad idea he was trying to act on. He turns to his side and presses his face into the cables warmed from the heat of his body, inhales the acrid stench of the motor oil that the circuitry is slathered in. He’ll need another shower, but he looks forward to it. He’s never been good at this, at dealing. All he needs is to be back in control, but perhaps its goalposts have shifted, and he hasn’t noticed. Perhaps whatever control he gets won’t be the kind he wants. Wanted. He doesn’t know what he wants.

“I’m screwed,” he informs the lion. The lion doesn’t reply. Setting his jaw, Keith reaches for the hammer.

The transmission lines won’t fix themselves.


	3. Chapter 3

The overhead mike in his room crackles into life in what Keith’s internal clock insists are early hours of the morning, but time is as immaterial this far from Earth as distance, or direction. It’s always night aboard the ship. It’s always day. A lack of definition that’s unsustainable in the long run but inevitable. He misses sun, any sun. He misses not feeling as though he were suspended, frozen and inanimate, without any real concept of change to fall back on: the cells in his body must die and regenerate, but he can’t tell.

Keith gets off his bunk. The display on his door tells him he’s been asleep for three hours. It’s enough to be plunged into three cycles of artificially-induced, rapid nREM stages followed by fifteen minutes of deep sleep. People don’t need as much rest as they think, provided that the rest they do get is carefully curated by machines optimised to increase performance in the field.

He doesn’t remember what he dreamed about, save that there was a desert in it. Not his desert, but a landscape constructed wholly by his subconscious. There was some kind of dead animal, with its fur matted with blood and clouded eyes that the birds have gotten to. Keith remembers trying to touch it, but not what happened next. It doesn’t matter. It was just a dream.

“Can anyone hear me? Coran, I don’t think they can hear me.” Allura’s voice, tinged with irritation, the anxious and dignified kind that is uniquely hers. The speakers cough up distortion, a shuffling noise; she must be covering the mike with her hand as she consults with Coran. Then: “Well, let’s hope so. Paladins! We will be reconvening in the upper level combat room, as soon as you can make it. Participation is mandatory. It’s time for more training,” she adds with an audible smile.

Keith can only sigh. He knows he’s going to make it to the combat room first, no matter how he tries to pace himself. Then Shiro and Pidge, professional and dedicated without Keith’s unhealthy edge. Then Hunk, complaining all the while, with packed lunch in case the training session runs longer than he likes. Nothing for fifteen minutes, then Lance, strolling in as though he owns the room and so no one will mind if his being late throws the regimen into complete disarray.

And yet, through a cosmic joke of inordinate proportions, it was Keith who got booted out of the Garrison.

He’s not angry about it, or bitter. He knows that Lance is a competent pilot, would be stupid not to see it. More than competent: cold-blooded under pressure and quick to make decisions with the right instincts to back them up, a rarely seen confluence of intuitive responses and hard-won skill. Machines love him, but that alone would not be enough to make his personality and disregard for hierarchies palatable to any ranking officer, much less a training instructor; Keith would know, it was his own undoing. Perhaps something happened to make the brass realise what they had on their hands. Perhaps they learned their lesson with Keith, and gave their second best more leeway. Perhaps Lance simply knows when to bite, and when to show his throat. Like he does with Keith. Like he did when he dropped his head, doglike in the half-forgotten atavism, exposing the vulnerable line of his spine for Keith to touch.

Keith can’t be thinking about this.

He’s halfway through a warmup, pulling himself out of an arduous stretch that makes both his legs scream in protest, when Pidge and Shiro walk into the combat room. Keith doesn’t acknowledge them. They, in turn, wear matching expressions of slightly forced neutrality, trying to keep in check their respective needs so as not to drown Keith in them. He can feel it like a physical presence, like something heavy and electric in the air. Shiro wanting to talk, make sure that he and Lance are all right, spill out his concern and misplaced responsibility, a cup overrun. Pidge is near vibrating with all the questions she wants to ask, curiosity warring with basic human decency: she must know, having conducted Lance’s exam, that the last thing Keith would want is answer any questions.

In their own ways, they’re trying to help. Keith doesn’t need it.

Allura and Coran arrive before Hunk, and by the time Lance saunters in, false leisure betrayed by the circles under his eyes, Allura is smiling in such a manic, plastic way that Keith wonders if one day she won’t simply snap.

“Now that we are all here,” she says, rising from her ungainly cross-legged slump on the floor, “after a far longer time than is prudent since we are still, I feel obligated to remind you, at war with an intergalactic empire —”

“The speakers in my quarters are fried!” Lance protests, bristling like a wet cat. “Hunk had to wake me up, jeez, sorry.”

 _You weren’t asleep_ , Keith thinks, but doesn’t give the words a voice. He rolls his shoulders, cracks his neck.

“In any case. Now that we’re all here, let us begin.” Allura spreads her hands benevolently. “I’d like to once again reiterate the importance of neural synchrony between you that is a necessity in forming Voltron: pilot and machine must be as one, but so must pilot and pilot, for —”

“Princess,” says Pidge, bumping her glasses to rub at the bridge of her nose. “We get it. We do. Is it another mindmeld thing?”

Hunk raises one hand as though he’s in a classroom. “But we can form Voltron. We don’t have to be in each other’s heads all the time. This ship is cramped enough as it is,” he adds under his breath. “No offence, guys.”

“None taken,” says Shiro, at the same time as Coran says, “On the contrary. The more at ease your minds are with one another, the better your coordination in the field. Make it effortless! Make it natural! Make it so that you can form Voltron when one of you is injured, or unconscious.”

“Or dead?” Lance suggests.

Allura clears her throat. “No one is dying. But it would be beneficial if you had the skill regardless. As paladins, you must be prepared for all contingencies that may, or may not, arise.”

It’s refreshing to hear, beneath the comforting veneer of Allura’s words, a simple truth: she does expect them to die.

Shiro starts handing out the neural inhibitor headsets. When it’s his turn, Keith tries to smile in a manner that Shiro might understand to be reassuring, but his face is stiff. It feels as though he’s just clumsily reshaping wax. He takes the headset, puts it on, and takes his place in the impromptu circle.

“We shall limit this session to four attempts. Now, clear your heads and focus your inner selves,” Coran intones as soon as they’re all sat on the floor and staring at the air before them with singleminded intent. “Remember: you are not competing, you are working together. Voltron can’t come together unless you are in perfect harmony, working as one. You must —”

Keith tunes him out.

He lets the floor in front of him take on the texture and density of old, beaten sand peppered with stubborn half-dried growth; the unmoving recycled air inside the combat room stirs the hair at the back of his neck, prickling when it touches the healing brand — no. Not this, not here.

His eyes drift shut and the desert opens around him, lonely and limitless, an expanse so wide the Earth’s curvature reveals itself in the corners of his vision. Other images register without impact, like indistinct flashes of landscape seen out of a car’s side windows. A family breakfast, a wave of emotion that is not his own at the sight of a middle-aged man in a uniform, strong black tea lingering on his tongue together with an unshakeable faith that his brother will always come home. He doesn’t have a brother.

The tea melts away, replaced with — for a moment, he can’t tell. He’s never had grilled salmon with sautéed eggplant and peppers, but his mouth waters. Here is a memory of safety, almost banal in its normalcy, unappreciated by everyone who never had to go hungry, count hours or days between meals, insides twisting in on themselves in a wordless plea as lethargy sets in. He remembers going without food at the group home when he wasn’t fast or strong or mean enough to get his own, the memory echoing and gaining traction juxtaposed with Hunk’s stronger one, more drastic, still buried deep. Keith tenses, doesn’t let the ricocheting thought consume him, pulls back.

Coran is narrating the neural link, but Keith can’t hear the words.

There is no desert, just a lightless depth of murky water. Shapes slither beneath the surface. Memories. His muscles are sore, mouth dry, but it’s not from hunger: it’s from fear. A need sparks somewhere at the back of his head — not his — to reach into the water, grab whatever he can, pull it out. They’re his memories. They’re not his memories. Excised with surgical precision, replaced with a howling emptiness where his life should go. Someone shouting at him to run; someone else, screaming in a voice thick from blood loss. His hand hovers over the surface of the water, shaking ever so slightly. Right hand. An unhealthy shade of violet.

Something grabs him. Shi—

Keith jerks back against the hold of thin, bony fingers, cold as a corpse’s. A voice whispers his own memories at him, mangled into a language he can’t parse, a sound deep and echoing as if coming from the bottom of a well.

He blinks, and it’s gone. The desert is gone, though not entirely: his toes sink into warm sand, and the wide open swathe of nothingness now reflects a sourceless light, an ocean stretching as far as the eye can see. The water is still, clean. Translucent. Keith breathes in salty air, for the first time calm in the artificial immersion of the neural inhibitor. He feels, thinks, remembers nothing but what is his, easily registered as part of his own body.

But the scenery, its blinding, vibrant light and colour all seem too much like something seen on a screen or monitor. As though he could reach out with one hand and meet a flat surface. It’s the artifice, the ethereality, that makes him realise the ocean is as constructed as his desert, laid over something real. Not meant to be shared. There is only one person left in the group to whom it could belong, and Keith remembers the last time they all connected, memories and machines bridged by the neural inhibitors: a large family, younger and older siblings, a girl hanging on to Lance’s shoulder with the same eyes as his. That Lance’s family are not here, absent at the base of his perception of himself —

In the brief second where Keith gives nothing of himself and drifts on the superficial serenity of the ocean, he feels Lance’s certainty: he’s never going home again. At the heels of that thought is something else, too. Another well, and emotion spilling over the brim, wistful and uncomplicated.

He feels what Lance feels.

The back of Keith’s neck stings, but before he can react, there’s a touch of warm, dry skin over his. He forgets to flinch away. He leans into the light hold as though it were years and not days since the last time he’s had someone’s hands on him. Not just someone.

It’s so easy. Keith knows what he wants.

The ocean vanishes.

The Galra sonar closes in on Red like a shark smelling blood in the water. Keith’s vision fills with the blare of alarms filling every display monitor, and he can only watch helplessly as the ion propellent fuses are overloaded one after another. Missiles reach them a second later. He’s baking in his flight suit, pleading at Red to hang in there, but the flight controls are unresponsive. Colour slowly drains out of its interior, replaced with a violet hue, like gangrene. The blue lion’s signature blinks in and out of range of his radar before the engines start boiling from the heat and pressure, strained to breaking with every consecutive g-force.

Keith can’t breathe. The inertial dampeners start giving out: every bone in his body feels the crushing weight of Red’s velocity, pinning him to the pilot seat. It will keep him pinned until he suffocates, or his ribs snap and puncture his lungs.

Above the alarms, his own voice and Red’s joints screaming with the effort of keeping together, he hears something else: the high, deafening shriek of air escaping into vacuum.

The cabin is depressurising.

Keith’s vision goes dark.

“— him!”

Someone is yelling. There’s a crack of metal hitting the floor, echoed threefold. Hands at his face, holding him up, someone peeling back one of his eyelids to check pupil dilation. Keith struggles out of the hold, ends up on his hands and knees, gagging despite the pain in his ribs. On an empty stomach, there’s nothing for him to puke up. Someone touches his back, lightly.

“Are you all right?” Allura sounds horrified, dignity forgotten as she helps Keith sit back down without falling over. “It didn’t occur to me that the damage to your lion — I am so, so sorry.”

“I’m fine,” he says, but the effort of speaking only makes him more nauseous. He covers his mouth with one hand.

“Pidge, get the med kit. If this was a neural flashback, he could be really hurt.” Shiro’s voice comes from above and to the right. With a tinge of hysteria, Keith wonders how Shiro can muster so much genuine concern when his head is filled with monsters slithering out of black water.

His gaze is drawn across the circle of its own volition, where Lance is sitting. He hasn’t moved. He stares at Keith with wide eyes, pale and shaken, and takes off his headset with unsteady hands.

The combat room’s lights seem to flicker in and out. Keith misses the ocean. The last thing he sees before he passes out is Lance turning away.

…

He spends almost a week in medical with rib fractures and lung trauma. His right lung needed surgery. Keith couldn’t even feel it when it happened, numbed by the epidural block but awake and alert as nanomachines nudged his insides into stitching themselves back up.

No one, not Allura or Coran or Pidge, can explain to him the precise way in which his body reacted to the neural inhibitor to cause physical damage. He didn’t get rib fractures getting blown out of the sky by the Galra, but memory might have — must have, could have, maybe; who knows? — filtered itself through a haze of adrenaline and fear, and produced a result more drastic than reality was.

Pidge ventures a guess: psychosomatic autoagression. Keith asks her to speak in plain English, and she shrugs, says, “Your brain thinks your body is hurt, so your body hurts itself to match the perception.”

“That makes zero sense,” Keith says, but his chest is bruised all over, aching any time he tries to take a deeper breath.

Pidge shrugs again. “A lot of things here don’t. I’m only surprised this is the first time one of us has been hurt like this. I mean — all of this tech, none of it’s calibrated for us, you know? We don’t have Altean physiologies. You put a person in the surgery pod for an appendectomy, and the AI removes all their skin or something.”

“Wow. You’re filling me with confidence, here.”

“Sorry.” She grins, lopsided, hands clasped between her knees and shoulders raised in a picture perfect snapshot of false innocence. The light reflected in her glasses makes them opaque. “Didn’t mean to freak you out, you’re fine. Well, you will be.”

She doesn’t linger. They are not, at the end of the day, friends. He’s friends with none of the other pilots, really, all of them having been thrown together by unlikely chance or circumstance and running on something not quite sane from the moment they made the first wormhole jump, hanging on to Lance behind the controls as the vacuum of space swallowed them and spat them back out someplace unknown.

The room Keith is in is bright, clean, and nothing at all like the hold aboard the Galra ship. It’s still stifling. He still feels the lack of windows acutely; it only serves as a reminder that none of them have breathed air that hasn’t been recycled and refiltered in far too long a time. He misses open terrestrial spaces, and being able to start running and stop only when he hits the limits of what his body can take. Take his racer out for a long, excruciating drive over a stony nighttime desert and know that he won’t meet another person unless he tries his damndest.

There was a wide stretch of beach he remembers driving across, a rare place with open access to saltwater that the government hasn’t seized or turned into another oil spill. It ran for several hundred miles of untamed wilderness, tranquil and never quiet, with a few derelict houses and cabins dotting the shoreline here and there. Their wood was half-rotted, swollen with dampness and ready to collapse at the slightest provocation. The last time Keith drove down that beach was two weeks before he shipped out to the Garrison. He hasn’t seen open water since, except from orbit.

It was the kind of place Lance would appreciate, and be obnoxious and unbearable about it.

Keith remembers it any time he remembers what the inside of Lance’s head felt like, the water almost blinding where it reflected a sun he couldn’t see. Warm, fresh air. It’s as though Lance infected him with his nostalgia, but of course he didn’t have to. Keith has buried his own deeper, but it resurges with a vengeance. The Altean ship never seemed more like a cage than now that he’s stuck in a recovery room adjacent to the med bay, in stiffly starched scrubs and swallowing a fistful of bitter-tasting pills to speed up cell regeneration.

Everyone visits him at intervals that must be scheduled. As if their daily routine now has _make sure Keith hasn’t died of boredom_ pencilled in-between lunch and lion repairs and maintenance. It’s tedious: no one knows what to say to him, since no one knows him well enough. Shiro tells him about the state that Red is in, what they’re doing to fix it; how many days or weeks it might take to bring it back to fighting weight, that it’s permissive as far as repairs go, though still shows preferential treatment to Allura and Coran. It doesn’t surprise Keith. Hunk is a great engineer, but he’s got little experience with Altean tech.

Allura and Coran take turns. Coran’s bedside manner is appalling, but it’s better than Allura, who sits stiffly at Keith’s bedside as though trying to pour herself into the mould of concerned but graciously approachable royalty with little success. She doesn’t know how to treat Keith one-on-one. Keith just wants her to stop hovering.

Hunk and Pidge usually tag-team him with a dedication to normalcy that Keith would find impressive, if it wasn’t quite so jarring. He’s more of a prop to them hanging out together, included in the group in a peripheral way that’s too much like pity for his liking. Lance’s absence is its own irritant, apparent in conversational pauses that last too long, waiting for a quip that never comes.

He is the only one who doesn’t see Keith in medical.

Sometimes, there are shuffling, furtive footsteps outside the door. The sound bounces off blank walls and slips beneath the slit of light falling in from outside the recovery room. Stops directly opposite the door for a minute or two. Keith imagines Lance leaning against the wall, legs crossed at the ankles and arms crossed over his chest; defensive right down to the soles of his feet.

It could be someone else, save for that Keith knows it’s not. He sits on his cot in too-thin scrubs, glaring a hole through the door as he dares Lance to make a move.

…

By day six, he’s pacing the length of his recovery room trying to burn off the restless jitters that keep him awake longer and longer, and it’s a struggle to still think of the room as anything but a cell. Sure: it hurts to move around, and it hurts to breathe a lot of the time and he suspects if he had reasons to laugh, that would hurt as well. It has been a while since he broke a rib, and fractures are as close as it gets without the bones actually snapping.

It doesn’t matter. He wants out. He wants to be back in the field, such as it is.

He doesn’t cough up blood, so Coran’s cautious pronouncement is no long-term damage to the lungs.

Being stuck in medical gives him time to think.

Lance doesn’t make a move. He doesn’t show up at all, and Keith can count on one hand the number of conversations they had since — since. It’s like playing the world’s slowest, most irritating game of chicken, and Keith has never been one for patience and understanding. After the uncomplicated transparency of the neural link, he’s tired of waiting for something to happen.

He dreams about the desert, like always, but sometimes he dreams about the length of that forgotten, empty beach on the West Coast. Sometimes he dreams about an ocean with no boundaries, no horizon, no source of light. Sometimes he dreams he’s not alone in either desert or ocean, and that always propels him upright, awake so fast that he’s left gasping for air.

The third night is when it happens for the first time. The room is dark, light sensors dimmed to maintain his circadian rhythm. An eerie glow creeps inside from the tiny gap between the floor and sliding doors, enough to see by.

He only remembers the dream in flashes, disconnected snapshots of sensation or emotion, or both: sun-warmed water up to his ankles, toes buried in the wet sand without fear of cutting the soles of his feet on shells or debris; a flash of underwater life, movement at the edges of his vision where something dashes past, spooked by the presence of a bigger predator; wind pulling gently at his shirt; and the awareness of someone there with him, an awareness for once not followed by the need to twitch or duck or run, avoid contact.

Even when the sense of presence materialises into something concrete and physical: the warmth of another body next to his, closer than they’ve been unless one of them has been injured or unconscious. Close enough to touch. In dream logic, it made sense to test that hypothesis. Keith took a step back, and grinned up at the sky when Lance reached out automatically to place one hand at the centre of his back, between the shoulder blades. The flat of his palm fit into the ridges and hollows of Keith’s spine.

The sheets pool at his waist as he gets his breathing back under control. But he’s not hooked up to any cardiovascular monitor, so there is no risk of his rapid heartbeat sending out an alert with an altogether wrong impression.

He lies back down, the top of his scrubs damp from sweat. Wrong impression sounds about right. It’s been a few days since he last woke up half-hard from a dream that was a recent memory.

It even makes a modicum of sense: what happened on the Galra ship was rushed and frantic, awkward and viscerally uncomfortable, but remembering what it was like to get off after being so turned on it hurt — to get off with Lance, no less, with him making those low-pitched noises that Keith can hear even now, every time he listens to Lance talk or laugh — it’s a shortcut. It’s physical.

This is different.

Keith tries to picture what it would be like if there was no rush, no frantic adrenaline-fuelled sprint to make the gas vacate their systems quicker. What it would be like if it was not a shortcut, without drugs and fear to ease the way and play matchmaker.

If he could push Lance down and touch him knowing that it’s him, just him, nothing telling him what to do. That he wants to do that — push Lance down, hold him there, make him lose his mind again and with the same intensity — is old news, by now. Maybe he’s always wanted it. Maybe he would act on the impulse, eventually, after one argument too many. All that electricity in the air between them, waiting to discharge one way or another. Release is release.

Keith kicks off the sheets and puts one hand over his stomach, plants his feet flat on the cot. His breathing picks up. He undoes his scrubs and reaches inside, spreading his knees for ease of access. The cold of his hands makes him shiver. Lance has a natural tendency to run hotter, a few fractions of a degree, but enough to make a difference. His hands on Keith would be warmer, and if Keith pushed him, he’d be rougher, too.

He tries it, ignoring the familiar feeling of his own calluses; twists his hand more harshly than he usually does. It’s good. It’s not quite good enough.

Without shortcuts and excuses, there would be no rush. Just heat and pressure, friction of skin against skin: physics. Keith bites his tongue to keep from being too loud, the impulse ingrained after sharing quarters for most of his life. An illusion of privacy. If it were real, he wouldn’t have to be quiet. He doesn’t doubt that Lance is always loud.

There’s a noise outside.

Keith stills, like a kid caught in the act, with one hand down his pants. Without thinking he slaps his other hand over his mouth, as if it could help. Heat rushes to his face so quickly it makes him dizzy with shame. For a second he prays to have imaged or misheard it, that it’s only the creak of alloys and machinery settling into itself like an old house, but there it is again, a soft shuffling sound noticeable once he searches for it.

It takes him another second to realise that the noise is familiar. Furtive footsteps, slide of fabric against metal and alloys: someone leaning their back against the wall. The squeak of rubber soles over the floor, and only Lance has sneakers that squeak just so.

It’s almost against his will that Keith relaxes, a slow release of tension as his muscles unclench. His hand is warm, now. Keith almost laughs. There are no more sounds outside, which means that Lance is still there and keeping himself still, which means that going on would be the stupidest idea Keith’s had recently.

He does it anyway. He lets himself breathe deeply and settle back into a steady rhythm, halting at first, then more sure. It’s easy to relax; he knows what he likes. If he’s louder, if he lets himself make a noise here and there that could be heard through the door, it isn’t as though Lance would call him on it.

It doesn’t take long until he’s shaking, hips coming off the cot to match the movement of his hand and bruised ribs aching from the tension spiking up and up. He wishes like hell for something he can’t quite put his finger on — except, of course, that he knows.

He wishes he weren’t alone.

He finishes quietly, breath stuttering to a halt and eyes drifting shut. Afterwards, he can’t hear anything outside. He quickly strips out of the top of his scrubs to wipe himself down before the whole thing can get disgusting. It’s a good way to avoid freaking out.

He doesn’t freak out.

By next morning, or whatever passes for morning in the interstellar medium, Keith is done waiting.

…

He doesn’t have to use the vents; he is not, technically, a prisoner. But the recovery room feels like a cell anyway, and Keith thinks if anyone saw him sneaking around he wouldn’t be able to front his way out of being obvious. When he’s not too angry to function, he knows he’s easy to read.

It could also be that he’s gone mildly insane to be crawling through twisting passages of a ship that’s supposed to be a home away from Earth. He knows it as well as anyone could, having memorised the layout in the first week since their arrival.

The ship felt less confining, less smothering, moored at a planet: an atmosphere, a sky above and a horizon to either side, something living to throw its inorganic parts into relief. Out here, drifting, it might as well be a tin can pulled by currents at the bottom of a sea.

The vents are quicker than making the trip from medical, even discounting the unlikely probability of running into someone on his way there. The ship has no detours, save for those that oxygen travels through, and Keith is done sitting around with his hands folded neatly in his lap, waiting to be acted on instead of acting. He makes it to the sleeping quarters, slotted into the easternmost wing of the castle above the docking bay. It’s a straight line down from their rooms to their lions; for Keith, now, it’s more of a sideways shimmy.

There are voices in the corridor outside of their rooms, words he can’t discern without paying attention. A higher-pitched laughter than he’s used to hearing regularly, a lower voice speaking in response. Pidge and Shiro, winding down after lunch or an early training session, the sounds of their conversation coming through the thin walls a flattened echo. Keith slips past them, unseeing and unseen, and it’s only now that it occurs to him to wonder if Lance is even in his room.

He could be doing anything. He could be running more repairs on Blue, or holing up somewhere with Hunk to spend time together for its own sake, friendly in a way Keith has never been with anyone. He could be at the opposite end of the ship, hightailing it as far away from Keith as possible in a space so paradoxically confined despite its sheer size. He could be anywhere.

Keith pries the vent lid open as quietly as he can, digging the tips of his fingers into the slits between cover and wall and lifting gently. If he’s nervous, he’s ignoring it so thoroughly that all he can feel is anticipation, wary. He is not entirely certain of what’s about to happen, but willing to take a leap of faith, faith being the mother of stupid ideas.

In the room below, Lance is sat on the floor with his back to the bed, fiddling with something that makes faint whirring noises. It looks like a gear, or a series of gears strung together until they resemble vaguely a deep sea fish of some kind. It’s dripping fluid on Lance’s fingers, dark and viscous.

All Keith can see is the top of his head, the hedgehog mess of his hair. The still-reddened place on his neck, over the top of his spine, where the brand stands in livid contrast to the warm tan of his skin. Keith wants to dig his nails into it. See if it really goes as deep as bone, imprinted forever down to the DNA; his own mark leaves him cold, a little irritated and a little frustrated at having another choice taken from him by force. Lance’s mark just makes him angry.

Lance doesn’t look up. It’s the easiest thing in the world to drop down onto his bed, directly below the vent. Keith lands on his toes, shifts his weight to the soles of his feet without making a sound, and for a perfectly crystalline moment feels like the ghost of a person, as immaterial as the neural link, as unreal.

Then, “Hey,” he says, and Lance shrieks.

There is no other word for it. He makes a noise like a cat that’s been stepped on, jumping about four feet into the air; Keith can almost see his hair standing on end, as if electrocuted. And he shrieks, like a little girl, high-pitched and ridiculous, as he whirls around, all wide eyes and scattered limbs.

It’s the most absurd thing Keith has seen in space to date. He lifts his eyebrows.

“What the hell,” Lance demands, once he can breathe again. For a moment there, he looked about a second from choking on his own tongue. “What in the absolute, mothertrucking hell, what — dude, what are you — where did you come from!?”

Keith points up to the vent.

“ _Why_?” Lance asks, voice so shrill that it’s piercing.

Keith shrugs. “If I knocked, you’d just run and keep avoiding me.”

“I kinda wanna run now! To have a freaking heart attack in peace! Also,” he adds, crossing his hands over his chest in a gesture that is both defensive and painfully campy, leaving greasy smears over his shirt, “I wouldn’t run and I’m not avoiding you.” He doesn’t look at Keith. He keeps his gaze fixed on a point to the right of Keith, on the blank wall behind him.

Keith ducks his head, running his hands through his hair. His own gaze drops to the floor, to Lance’s feet. No more squeaky sneakers, just socks. He feels warmer, remembering the sound of the soles of Lance’s shoes against the floor outside the recovery room. The gear-fish, almost organic in its shapelessness, lies forgotten at Lance’s feet. If he moves to the side, he’ll step on it.

“We should talk,” says Keith, and cringes at the words. “Probably.”

“Yeah, no. Bad idea. Talking? Never solves anything. That’s just what those whacked out shrinks doing enlistment psych evals want you to think. It’s crap. Talking is overrated.”

“I thought I was supposed to be the paranoid one.”

Lance snorts. “I didn’t say it’s an _alien_ conspiracy. There’s a difference, you UFO chasing freak.”

Keith looks at him for a long beat. He starts laughing despite himself, like an involuntary response. It takes another second for Lance to join him, and before he does he stares at Keith as though he’s something alien and incomprehensible. Once he cracks up too, though, the tension bleeds out of the line of his shoulders and he slumps where he stands, suddenly looser and more at ease, expression a picture of chagrined fondness.

Taking it as his cue to relax, Keith shifts into a more comfortable position on the bed, leaning back against the wall with his legs stretched in front of him.

“Did you break out of medical?” Lance asks, giving the scrubs Keith is still wearing a dubious once-over. “Are you going to bleed on my stuff? Don’t bleed on my stuff, I hate doing laundry.”

“Is it breaking out if I wasn’t locked in?”

“Oh, man. You did.” Lance looks as though he wants to slap himself in the face, but rethinks the impulse when he sees how dirty his hands are. He hangs back, a little awkward in the middle of his own room, as though Keith’s gravitational field was repelling him and he couldn’t come any closer. “You totally broke out of there against medical advice. Dang, I’ve got to contain my animal magnetism, it’s making you all volatile and crap.”

“Your animal what?” Keith says. If he starts laughing again, he’ll lose. He bites the inside of his cheek.

Lance runs his hands through his hair. “Forget it. What, uh. Did you want to talk about?”

“You’re gonna make me say it?” With a sigh, Keith gently knocks his head against the wall. “This is unbelievable. C’mon, you were in my head.”

“And you were in mine! But you don’t see me dropping out of an air vent to ambush you in your humble abode, so forgive the lack of sympathy.”

Keith is reminded of the last time he tried to connect, to make an effort. Maybe he should have known from the start it would be a lost cause; but maybe he should also have known from the start that it should have clued him in, the simple fact that he wanted to connect in the first place. Has it ever happened before? Has he ever genuinely, of his own free will, made the first move?

The thought of going back to medical, then back to his quarters, alone and with this odd, echoing emptiness where a part of him should be but got lost somewhere along the way — the thought is not appealing. Jerking off alone as memories fade into half-remembered dreams, just sensation and a certainty that he missed his chance at something he didn’t know he needed until it slipped through his fingers, appeals even less.

It’s been a long time since he has last wanted anything tangible, or attainable. It’s been a long time since anything — anyone — made him feel the same giddy, exhilarating terror as pushing two hundred miles per hour with nothing to guide him but the horizon, or the stars.

He gets up. Lance reacts to him on automatic, taking a step back for Keith’s step forwards, but he stops himself with a determined set to the jaw, plants his feet a shoulder width apart. A fighting stance. His hands curl into loose fists, and Keith remembers vividly the way Lance grabbed the back of his neck in the neural link, casual and proprietary, and the way Lance grabbed him in reality, drugged out of his sane mind. Now, he tenses, as if certain that Keith is about to hit him.

Keith pulls him close by the dirty, grease-stained front of his shirt.

It’s not the most dignified kiss of his life, or the most comfortable, and it seems weird as hell that it’s not even the first time he’s kissed Lance. But the Galra ship saw them both thrown so far out of the confines of normalcy that it all might as well have happened to strangers. Keith feels aware of his own body, every inch of it bent slightly at an angle to match Lance like a parenthesis, sober and in control.

For a second Lance stands frozen, shocked into deer-in-headlights stillness, but then it passes, and he kisses back. It’s different than it was before. It’s better, even if being present in his own body means that Keith is too conscious of all the tiny discomforts, the strained bend of his wrists, Lance biting his lower lip in a way that is distinctly painful instead of hot. It’s real.

When Keith pulls back, he can’t help grinning, just a little. Lance stares at him, a dazed film over his eyes, breath shallow.

“You can’t be for real.” He licks his lips, as if chasing the taste. Keith can’t help but track the movement. “Are you, like, having a seizure right now? Oh, god, it’s some kind of death endorphins, isn’t it. Are you _dying_?”

Keith shoves him gently in the chest, but doesn’t let go of his shirt. “Lance, you were there. In the neural bridge. And on the Galra ship.”

“We agreed,” says Lance. He swallows, hard, but doesn’t pull out of Keith’s grip, and Keith knows he’s arguing half for its own sake, a Pavlovian response to Keith opening his mouth. “What happened on the ship didn’t mean anything.”

“Yeah, and that’s not working out. So maybe it did mean something.” He pauses, a tentative smirk pulling at his mouth. “You know I heard you, right? Outside my room?”

Lance sways back, pulling against Keith’s hold. An ugly flush spills over what’s visible of his collar bones, crawling up the sides of his neck. He looks a hair’s breath from bolting, so Keith tightens his grip; it forces Lance to take a step closer.

“You weren’t exactly subtle,” he says, settling into a wary sort of ease. Dipping his toes into the water and testing it for sharks. “The opposite of subtle. Like extremely loud. And graphic.” But he doesn’t protest his presence outside of Keith’s room, doesn’t even pretend not to know what Keith means. He doesn’t move away again.

Keith can see the way Lance’s gaze drops to his mouth when he speaks.

“That’s okay. You were supposed to hear.”

This time, Lance goes for him first. Perhaps the anger is what was missing the last time: this kiss is thorough and dirty enough that Keith doesn’t have time to register anything but Lance finally and with earnest abandon making up his mind. That, and Lance’s teeth digging into his lower lip: a bright, sharp stab of pain.

Keith was right, Lance’s hands really are warmer than his own; one curling around his biceps hard enough to leave bruises, the other digging into the side of his neck, Lance’s thumb grazing the hollow beneath his jaw, pressing until it hurts. It’s the move Keith has been waiting for.

They shift around each other still separate, still slightly off-beat and off-balance, finding their feet in the sand. It’s not as easy, without drugs and artifice and physical necessity. Keith notes distantly that Lance still smells faintly of propellant; but it makes sense, now, knowing he spends time doing manual repairs on his lion. Another piece of the puzzle, slotting into place. Halfway to revealing a person.

Keith doesn’t know what to do with his hands until an idea occurs, spontaneously: he’s allowed to touch Lance’s mark, now. He digs his fingers into the healing, oversensitive flesh. Lance bites him, and Keith likes how it hurts, how it makes him conscious and focussed and present; he drags his nails over the brand, hard enough for Lance to gasp, shaken out of his fuzzy reverie.

“You wanna,” he starts, losing grip on the sentence immediately and letting it drift off into a vague question mark. He looks as if the thought of gunning it out of the room is still a distinct possibility, but becoming less and less likely by the minute.

“Sure,” says Keith, in a passable attempt at nonchalance, trying to belie the urgent pull in the pit of his stomach and the tips of his fingers, and walks them backwards until his shins knock into the bedframe.

Lance snickers, warm breath ghosting over Keith’s jaw, teeth bright against the dark flush over his face. “Wow. You are so easy I’m actually embarrassed for you.”

Keith grabs a firm fistful of his junk, raising one eyebrow when Lance yowls in catlike outrage. “Really. Anything else you want to share with the class?”

Lance mimes zipping his mouth and says, “As you were,” thus ruining the effect entirely. Keith rolls his eyes but lets go of him, or rather lets go of him only long enough to pull him back towards him, nascent gravity doing its work: now that he’s touched Lance without the tantalising excuse of a badly calibrated knockout gas, he couldn’t stop if he wanted to.

He doesn’t want to.

He only has a vague idea of what to expect, and doesn’t let it surprise him when Lance shoves him ungently down on the cot. Keith lands with a bounce, supports himself on his hands so as to not lie flatly and think of England; he doesn’t plan on going down that easily, whatever Lance might think.

What surprises him is that Lance doesn’t follow, but drops to his knees where he stands, long legs folding at the knees until he’s on the floor and having to look up to maintain eye contact. Wary and expectant, as though certain that Keith will laugh him out of the room. Like that could ever happen.

“Yeah,” says Keith to the unspoken question, “sure,” and doesn’t care about the needy, eager edge to his voice. He’s far too gone now to take back anything that’s happened, and everything that built up to this, and the simple fact that he needs it more than he could ever have anticipated.

He doesn’t talk more than he has to. He lets his fingers tangle in the short hair at the nape of Lance’s neck, not too hard but enough to guide Lance once he’s got his scrubs open. He couldn’t talk, really, even if he wanted to, breath leaving his lungs too quickly each time to force any meaningful words out, pulled inexorably by the ebb of coherent thought.

Lance would talk, if his mouth wasn’t occupied: of that Keith is sure. He wants to hear it. He wants to hear what Lance would have to say, halfway undone and bent at an awkward angle but, for once, not complaining. His left hand is flat over Keith’s thigh, hot through the fabric scrubs, leaving a dirty imprint; the weird mechanism he was fixing or breaking lies forgotten on the floor.

Keith comes so quickly it takes him by surprise: in one moment it’s all escalating, steady and inevitable, and in the next he’s curled around Lance’s back, hands struggling for purchase on his shirt, digging into warm muscle. He tries to hold back noises he would regret later, eyes squeezed shut until light explodes behind his eyelids in supernova bursts.

He hears Lance choke, and almost pulls back, but it’s over before he can. He comes down with a shaky breath in and out while Lance swallows a few times, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.

“You’ve got —” He reaches down to rub at the corner of Lance’s lips. The immediate impulse is to pull away, and a part of him is horrified. It’s the most intimate thing he has ever done. But Lance tilts his head to lean into the touch, still getting his breath back, so Keith waits out the tidal wave of discomfort.

Somehow, not entirely sure how, he ends up with his hand wrapped around the back of Lance’s neck. His palm is sticky with sweat, but Lance’s skin is slightly damp, too. He thinks that it’s how it should be: messy and wet, organic and primal at the root. Real and undeniable. No matter how much they’d like to, they weren’t fully made to live out here, confined to a metal can hurtling through the vacuum between stars.

He pulls Lance onto the cot, enjoying the way Lance lets himself be manhandled. There isn’t a lot of room to manoeuvre, but Keith gives it his best shot, and ignores Lance breathlessly laughing at him. He ends up halfway on top, sprawled over Lance with a leg hooked around one of Lance’s to take up less space. There are too many layers of clothes involved. With an irritated noise Keith shimmies out of his scrub pants and kicks them off.

“Don’t let me interrupt you,” says Lance, still cackling. “No, really, get those control freak urges out of your system, it’s fine, I’ll wait.”

Just for that, Keith presses one cold hand to his abdomen. “You were saying?”

“Nothing.” Lance swallows compulsively. Keith watches, transfixed, the bunch and release of muscle as he tries not to shiver. “Proceed at your leisure, boy wonder.”

“Talk less,” says Keith, and shoves his hand down his pants.

Of course, Lance doesn’t obey. “How else would you know if you’re doing it right unless I — oh. That’s nice,” he says, breath going shaky and shallow when Keith twists his hand at just the right angle. He doesn’t seem to mind the cold.

It’s strange to think how easy it would be to hurt him now, so close to vital anatomy, inner thighs and neck and chest. Stranger still when Keith realises their positions were reversed not ten minutes ago, and he was subject to the mercy and goodwill of someone else. There is no space on the cot to get comfortable, but he tries anyway, strokes one hand over the breakable jut of Lance’s clavicle, catches Lance’s lower lip between his teeth and pulls, and doesn’t think too much about how easily Lance gives of himself, open and vulnerable, bright-eyed as he stares at Keith as if seeing something far more impressive than the reality.

Keith kisses him to avoid that look, and what it might be saying.

For the second time Lance comes all over his fingers, hot and sticky, but this time Keith doesn’t itch all over to get away and flay the skin from his bones. He eases Lance through the comedown, and only takes his hand off him once his breathing has calmed and his gaze is focussed. The sheet falls victim to his trying to wipe come off his fingers without getting up from the cot, inertia setting into him all at once.

“That’s horrible and unhygienic and I’m not going to do anything about it because I don’t care,” Lance announces.

Keith laughs, but he keeps it quiet, a sharp exhale. “I should probably go,” he says, with no intention of moving. “Since we talked, and all.”

“You should probably shut up.” Lance shifts around, and it leaves one of his legs anchored around both of Keith’s, pinning him in place. It’s disgraceful. Keith doesn’t mind all that much. “Here I am, naked as the day I was born having bared my innermost heart to your ungrateful ass, and you want to go? You’re not going anywhere.”

“Lance, you’re fully clothed.” As he says it, it occurs to Keith to fix that. He starts pulling Lance’s pants off his hips, so they may be equally unmade. The ship creaks around him, open vent gaping above, but Keith elects to disregard it, cosy and warm.

“It’s a metaphor, you absolute philistine.”

“You can get naked later, though.”

Lance gives him a long look, unexpectedly perceptive. It’s through an effort of will that Keith doesn’t turn away, and lets the unadorned truth hang in the air between them like the last of plaster chipping away from a brick wall. It’s so simple, and so stupid, but at least Keith doesn’t have to say it outright: Lance doesn’t press him to be more specific, and reads the admission for what it is. The prickle of discomfort is reflexive, and Keith disregards it, too.

He doubts he will ever not feel it, but he can learn to shrug it off. Sometimes.

He turns onto his back. It puts his head over Lance’s arm, stretched sideways, and he’s had better but also worse pillows; he doesn’t mind. His gaze falls to the floor, where Lance’s bit of odd, greasy machinery lies silent and inconspicuous.

“What’s that thing you were working on when I came in?”

“Uh.” Lance lifts his head to see what Keith is looking at. “Oh, that. It’s the hyperdrive transponder from Red, it got fried when we made the wormhole jump. Dunno if it’s fixable, but I thought I’d give it a shot.”

Keith blinks, and turns back to him. They’re very close; Lance goes slightly cross-eyed maintaining eye contact. “And Red let you take it?”

“Sure it did. Your lion totally loves me.” He grins, shit-eating and smugly knowing. “Obviously Blue will forever be first in my heart and soul and whatever, but Red’s not so bad, for a scrappy asshole.”

“I’m not —” Keith cuts himself off with a huff. He walked right into the conversational trap. Lance snickers, still grinning, and knocks his fist gently against Keith’s arm. Keith lets him. He relaxes. He’s too warm, too loosened at the joints, to stay irritated. Instead, “I guess you’re not that horrible either,” he says, hoping it comes out as though the admission pains him physically, which it does, “when you’re not showing off.”

“I don’t show off, I’m naturally glamorous,” Lance retorts immediately.

Keith kicks him, his heel connecting with Lance’s shin with enough force that Lance kicks him back in confused patellar reflex. Both their laughter echoes in the otherwise empty room, and for once, it displaces the pervasive creaks and groans of alloys and unknowable alien machines and the starless void pressing in all around it, lonely and infinite.

It isn’t the desert, and it’s far from the ocean. Keith might never see either again, and he’ll never take Lance to that solitary stretch of beach on the West Coast begging to be driven on at high speeds. He can’t bring himself to regret it.

The ship is full of voices, but for now Keith ignores all but one.

**Author's Note:**

> And we’re done. For the record: this monstrosity was supposed to be five or six thousand words long. I wasn’t supposed to spend so much time reading about plasma cutting or ion propulsion. A huge thank-you to everyone who stuck around, subscribed, commented, and so on. I appreciate it a lot, and you’ve made this first venture into Voltron fandom fun as hell.
> 
> Tumblr user purpleneutrino has done [this wonderful art](http://purpleneutrino.tumblr.com/post/152436717670/lance-is-staring-at-him-unmoving-eyes-a-little) for a scene in Part 2. Please check it out and give her all the love!
> 
> I recently acquired a sporadically updated [tumblr](https://csoru.tumblr.com); come say hi.


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